Numeri per argomentare: strategie di dispositio nelle produzioni scritte degli studenti universitari

Abstract

This paper concerns text organization and the signalling of its arrangement in parts. Drawing on text linguistics and combining a qualitative and a quantitative description, it explores the use of enumerative markers as linguistic devices of discursive structure, adopted by Italian second-year university students while fulfilling a timed writing task. More precisely, the paper presents a corpus-based analysis, focusing on textual segments opened by two types of enumerative markers: in primo luogo (in the first place) and in primis. The occurrences are extracted from UniverS-ITA, a corpus made by a total of 2016 students’ written texts (813,000 words). The paper aims at documenting and characterizing, on a qualitative level, the functioning of numerical sequencers (or ordinatori numerici del discorso), mainly drawing on textual scope, i.e. their effect on the textual segments involved. Findings suggest that the strategy most applied by students in the process of writing is an additive one, also emphasized by the frequent use of inoltre (moreover), whereas the homogenous series introduced by a marker acting as a trigger are rather scarce. Nevertheless, some attempts to give a linear ordering to the contents occur. Besides their descriptive value, these findings present relevant implications for teaching and learning academic writing at universities.