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An evaluative writing genre that presents difficulties for university students is the argumentative essay (AE). This article aims to relate the quality of the introductions to the quality of the AEs, considering their lexical-grammar features. To achieve this, we selected 96 AEs, produced in two phases during one academic term. Then, we compared both phases of the evaluation of the AEs and their introductions (IEA), as well as their lexical-grammar features. Subsequently, we correlated the AE data with their AEIs. Finally, we performed a clustering analysis, according to lexical-grammar patterns. The findings indicate a) significant differences between AEs and AEIs of both phases, b) distinctive lexical-grammar patterns between both phases, c) a high correlation between AE and AEI quality, and d) a continuum of quality between introductions. Between the phases, we observed an improvement in the quality of the AEIs not only from the argumentative point of view but also according to the characteristics of the discursive genre. Furthermore, the importance of this macro-move as a predictor of content quality is proven. These results are useful for the early detection of difficulties in academic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of academic discursive genres has received special attention in the last decade. However, studies on the thesis genre are still incipient, especially from the lexical-grammatical empirical perspective. Our main aim is to describe lexical-grammatically each rhetoric move of the genre thesis in linguistics, extracting and quantifying trigrams of lemmas in a set of texts composed by 33 undergraduates Linguistics thesis. Corpus linguistics tools are used for the automatic labeling of their lexical units, specifically to identify the pattern of lemmas used in the statistical analysis. Among the most relevant findings, it is worth noting that the trigrams of lemmas make it possible to differentiate 99.3% moves of the genre. In addition, the trigrams of each move are identified, which are functionally related to each communicative purpose. These findings make possible to establish a clear relationship between the linguistic forms and the communicative functions carried out in this genre. In addition, these results have applications for the development of writing assistant tools, from a perspective of the genre-based pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diffusion of fake news is a growing problem with a high and negative social impact. There are several approaches to address the detection of fake news. This work focuses on a hybrid approach based on functional linguistic features and machine learning. There are several recent works with this approach. However, there are no clear guidelines on which linguistic features are most appropriate nor how to justify their use. Furthermore, many classification results are modest compared to recent advances in natural language processing. Our proposal considers 88 features organized in surface information, part of speech, discursive characteristics, and readability indices. On a 42 677 news database, we show that the classification results outperform previous work, even outperforming state-of-the-art techniques such as BERT, reaching 99.99% accuracy. A proper selection of linguistic features is crucial for interpretability as well as the performance of the models. In this sense, our proposal contributes to the intentional selection of linguistic features, overcoming current technical issues. We identified 32 features that show differences between the type of news. The results are highly competitive in the classification and simple to implement and interpret. • We provide a comprehensive list of linguistic features for fake news detection. • We validated 32 of 88 linguistic features in a large news dataset. • The results of the experiments exceed previous results with this approach. • We deliver detailed interpretations in the exploratory and explanatory analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The senior thesis is a relevant discourse genre to prove academic knowledge and to obtain a university degree. The descriptions of this kind of genre have been focusing on the lexical-grammatical and discursive rhetoric level; as well as in the process of construction and defense of the thesis. The semantic level, however, has been scarcely studied. This paper describes the characteristics of the authorial attribution of knowledge given by the semantic representation of utterances of the introduction and conclusion section. The corpus comprises 364 senior theses of four disciplines. First, we extracted utterances with explicit authorial attribution. Secondly, we constructed the semantic representation of statements according to the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). According to the results, we can highlight the use of the first person plural as the first argument of verbs of activity in structures do' (x, [pred' (x, y)]), mainly in the conclusion section. The thematic role perfomer presents a high frequency in all four disciplines. Speaker and judger are also very frequent in the x argument. Consequently, the most common macro-role is Actor. Finally, it is interesting to note the potential of using RRG in academic discourse analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]