This study employs a corpus-based method in analysing the noun and noun premodification in journal articles

Engagement markers which are reader-oriented rhetorical features are used by writers to signal the presence of readers in their writing. As a key rhetorical feature, the use of engagement markers in academic writing has been explored in recent years. Despite this, few studies have compared their use in research articles and opinion pieces. In addition, studies on engagement markers have not drawn extensively on corpus methodology. Given this, the current study explores the use of engagement markers in economics research articles (henceforth RAs) and opinion pieces (henceforth OPs) based on corpus methods from two self-compiled corpora of RAs and OPs. The corpus analysis tool AntConc was used to generate data need for the analysis of engagement markers in the two genres based on Hyland's (2005b) framework of five types of engagement markers. The results of this study show that there is a higher occurrence of engagement markers in RAs than OPs. Among the different types of engagement markers, directives were predominantly employed by the writers in both genres. The use of engagement markers in RAs and OPs is discussed in relation to the target audiences and different communicative purposes of the two genres. These findings have important implications for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) writing.

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Research in meta-discourse, particularly explicit meta-discourse or meta-discourse markers has contributed much knowledge on the discourse features of specialised genres. However, there are very few studies on implicit meta-discourse. The current study explores implicit meta-discourse in legal discourse by comparing the implicit interpersonal meta-discourse in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China with the Constitution of the United States. The focus of the study is the use of implicit meta-discourse, particularly the grammatical meta-discourse in the legal discourse of two different languages and cultural groups. The findings demonstrate that there are similarities and differences in the use of implicit meta-discourse in the two constitutions. Within the context of language discourse, the findings of the current study suggest that legal discourse is distinctive in the use of implicit interpersonal meta-discourse, particularly in the way writers intrude into the discourse implicitly by certain key grammatical forms of meta-discourse. Despite the objectivity and rigour of legal discourse, the current study found that there is some level of subjectivity in such discourse, evident from the use of implicit meta-discourse.Keywords: implicit meta-discourse; meta-discourse markers; legal discourse; interpersonal metadiscourse Meta-discourse refers to the means by which writers organise a text, express their attitude, and establish a relationship with readers. It is an important means of conveying the information, building writer-reader interactions and facilitating understanding. Since its introduction by the structural linguist Zelig Harris (1959), there has been an increasing body of research in meta-discourse (e.g., Crismore, 1983;Vande Kopple, 1985;Beauvais, 1989;Ädel, 2006;Hyland, 2008;Kawase, 2015;Zhang, 2016;Jiang & Hyland, 2016) which has contributed new knowledge and understanding regarding its use and function in discourse.To date, studies on meta-discourse have focused largely on meta-discourse markers, which are also known as explicit meta-discourse. They are essentially explicit textual markers and have been analysed from different perspectives. Hopper (1981) used the term "meta-talk" to refer to explicit forms of meta-discourse and defined meta-discourse as explicit verbal properties of another message. The classifications of this type of explicit meta-discourse include metalinguistic referent (e.g., discourse deixis: there, here; demonstrative pronouns: this, that, etc.), metalinguistic operators (e.g., right, wrong, true, false, for example, etc.) and metalinguistic verbs (e.g., illocutionary acts of speech or verbs of saying: assert, say, tell, etc.). Beauvais' (1989) examination of meta-discourse based on speech act theory suggests that metadiscourse is the element in a sentence that conveys illocutionary contents in either fully or partially explicit form. In the sentence "I believe that education is necessary" for instance, the metadiscourse marker is "I believe that." It is an ...

Speech enhancement in realistic scenarios still remains many challenges, such as complex background signals and data limitations. In this paper, we present a co-attention based framework that incorporates self-supervised and curriculum learning to derive the target speech in noisy environments. Specifically, we first leverage self-supervision to pre-train the coattention model on the task of audio-visual synchronization.The pre-trained model can focus on the lip of speakers automatically, and then the self-supervised features from the model are combined with a u-net regression network to separate the spectrograms of sound mixtures. To make the training process easier and further improve the performance, we introduce the curriculum learning scheme for the training stage of speech enhancement. Extensive experiments show that our model achieves superior performance over previous selfsupervised method for speech enhancement, and demonstrate the generalizability of our approach to the transferred dataset.