“Maybe, but probably not”: A cross-disciplinary study of negation in Three Minute Thesis presentations

Three Minute Thesis (3MT) presentations have received global popularity, which develop the discursive competence of postgraduate students to communicate their disciplinary research to a wide audience. Despite increased research into aspects of 3MT presentations, little is known about how student presenters react to the audience's knowledge base and recognize the possibility of rejecting their arguments. Therefore, this study focuses on the use of negation in 3MT presentations, suggesting how presenters introduce an alternative positive position into the dialogue, and hence acknowledging it, so as to reject it. We explored the frequencies, forms, and functions of negation at the discourse-semantic level with other appraisal resources in a corpus of 124 3MT presentations across hard and soft disciplines. Our results revealed that not, no, and negative contractions were the most frequent, and notably preferred by soft-disciplinary speakers. We also identified intriguing cross-disciplinary variations in the way negation was used alongside pronounce resources that expressed explicit authorial emphases to co-articulate the rhetorical effect in discourse. Pedagogical implications are raised as to the strengthening of students' rhetorical awareness of linguistic resources to achieve effective academic presentations and wide communication of disciplinary knowledge.