If you look at the table…: Directives in conference presentations and university lectures

Abstract

This paper investigates differences in the characteristic form, frequency and role of directives in two spoken academic genres, conference presentations and university lectures. The study also reports the existence of differences between English native and non-native speakers in the way they use directives at conferences. Data consist of a self-compiled corpus of conference talks and a comparable corpus of lectures from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Results show that, comparatively, directives in lectures are stronger and less mitigated than in conference presentations. Conference speakers in our study make the intrinsic imposition in directives more palatable for the peer audience by using milder directive forms, deploying indirectness and stressing communal membership. Non-native speakers' directives show interesting similarities with those in lectures, a possible sign of overlapping or confusion of two major genres in the “overpopulated” generic world of academics. Findings on conference presentations and lectures are also compared with existing evidence on directives in written research articles: some characteristic roles of directives in writing are irrelevant in speech, while others, e.g. integrating visuals in the presentation and reactivating background and previously constructed content, are central to the spoken genres but irrelevant to writing.