Page 147 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

PRONOUNS
133
Filled slot
IT
+
seems/appears
seems
THAT-clause
that oil reserves should last for another forty years
An advantage of this visual piece-by-piece constructing of sentences with it is that students can see that the subject has no referent (and is thus "empty" of meaning) and that it is a constant and invariable feature of it-cleft constructions.
Various analyses of written academic corpora have shown that nonreferential it occurs frequently in the following combinations that may be useful for academic writers to become familiarwith:
•
With adjectives—
it is (not) (im)possible to/that it is likely/unlikely that
it is important to/that
it is necessary to
• •
•
With modal verbs—it may bethat
With modal verbs and adjectives—it may (not) be(impossible to/that, it should bepossible to/that, it may be necessary to/that, it is dear that, it is im-
portant to/that
With passive verbs—it can beseen that, it should benoted that, it has been suggested that, it has also been ... (determined, found, argued, stated, im-
plied, shown, noted, written). Most passive constructions are accompa- nied by that-clauses that contain the focal information.
THERE EXISTENTIAL SUBJECT
Like the nonreferential it, the existential there has little semantic content. In general, however, the syntactic structure ofthere-constructionsis much sim- pler than zY-constructions, and the existential there is frequent in L2 written texts. The discourse function of existential constructions is to introduce new information and/or topics, and most co-occur with place and time adverbs (e.g., there arefew of them in the world today, there are many such teachers in my country). It is important to note, however, that the existential there structures are particularly rare in most written genre, including academic, where they are encountered fewer than 10 times per million words (Biber et al., 1999). Overall, existential there is more frequent in conversational than written dis- course. Because there-constructions are relatively syntactically simple, L2 ac-
it is interesting to
it is difficult/easy to it is (not) clear that it is true that
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