Sequencers in different text genres: Academic writing, journalese and fiction

This paper presents the results of a descriptive analysis of discourse structuring devices in written texts. It discusses typologies of metadiscourse (Hyland, 1998; Hyland and Tse, 2004) and establishes a categorisation of organisational metadiscourse markers, i.e. linguistic items that signpost the discourse organisation on the metadiscourse level. One particular group of these markers, sequencers, will be defined more precisely and described by means of a qualitative analysis of their structural parameters. A manual corpus analysis (Degand and Bestgen, 2004), allying quantitative and qualitative analyses, gives a detailed picture of their actual use in written discourse and of their distribution among the three text genres of academic writing, journalese and fiction.