Title: A contrastive study of generic integrity in the use of attitudinal evaluation in research articles written for different audiences
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2012, vol. 38, iss. 2, pp. [79]-96
Extent
[79]-96
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2012-2-5
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/126944
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
In today's competitive world of academia, besides offering innovative and robust results, writing scholars must strategically deploy attitudinal evaluation to convince editors and reviewers that their research is valuable and worth publishing. Yet the use of these rhetorical resources can vary across different disciplines, languages and cultures. In addition, the audience for which authors are writing their research (local or international) can significantly influence the way attitudinal evaluation is used. My corpus consists of 72 research articles (RAs) published internationally in English in three different disciplines (Applied Linguistics, Business Management and Food Technology). A parallel corpus of 36 RAs published locally in Spanish in the same three disciplines has been used as a control group with the aim of establishing whether their different cultures/languages and the different degrees of competitiveness can determine the way attitudinal markers are used. Manual and electronic analyses have been combined to identify and quantify attitudinal markers in the texts. These markers were classified according to several parameters such as the entity evaluated (Thetela 1997), the type of value expressed and the subject receiving the evaluation. The results for the two sub-corpora were then statistically treated to allow us to find patterns through quantitative contrastive analysis. The results have shown that, besides significant disciplinary variation in the amount of attitudinal markers used, RA authors use evaluative strategies differently depending on the context of publication. Promoting the significance of one's work seems to be a more important strategy in order to get it published internationally, specially within the most competitive and urban disciplinary fields. Despite being generally regarded as belonging to the same genre, locally published RAs clearly deviate from international RAs in the use of these features, which suggests it may constitute a different subgenre with its own generic integrity.
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[3] Bhatia, Vijay K. (2004) Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-Based View. London and New York: Continuum.
[4] Biber, Douglas and Edward Finegan (1989) 'Styles of stance in English: Lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect'. Text 9 (1), 93–124.
[5] Blagojević, Savka (2009) 'Expressing attitudes in academic research articles written by English and Serbian authors'. Linguistics and Literature 7 (1), 63–73
[6] Channel, Joanna (2001) 'Corpus-based analysis of evaluative lexis'. In: Hunston, Susan and Geoff Thomson (eds.) Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 38–55.
[7] Conrad, Susan and Douglas Biber (2001) 'Adverbial marking of Stance in Speech and Writing'. In: Hunston, Susan and Geoff Thomson (eds.) Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 56–73.
[8] Crawford Camiciottoli, Belinda (2004) 'Audience-oriented relevance markers in lectures'. In: Del Lungo, Gabriella and Elena Tognini (eds.) Academic Discourse: New Insights into Evaluation. Bern: Peter Lang, 81–97.
[9] Fortanet, Inmaculada (2007) 'Evaluative language in peer review referee reports'. English for Academic Purposes 7 (1), 27–37. | DOI 10.1016/j.jeap.2008.02.004
[10] Giannoni, Davide (2005) 'Negative Evaluation in Academic Discourse. A Comparison of English and Italian Research Articles'. Linguistica e Filologia 20, 71–99.
[11] Hunston, Susan (1993) 'Evaluation and ideology in scientific writing'. In: Ghadessy, Mohsen (ed.) Register Analysis: Theory and Practice. London: Pinter Publishing, 57–73.
[12] Hunston, Susan (1994) 'Evaluation and organization in a sample of written academic discourse'. In: Coulthard, Malcolm (ed.) Advances in Written Text Analysis. London: Routledge, 191–218.
[13] Hyland, Ken (1999) 'Disciplinary discourses: writer stance in research articles'. In: Candlin, Christopher and Ken Hyland (eds.) Writing: Texts, Processes and Practices. London: Longman, 99–121.
[14] Hyland, Ken (2002) 'Academic argument: Induction or interaction'. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 44, 29–45.
[15] Hyland, Ken (2004) 'Engagement and Disciplinarity: the other side of evaluation'. In: Del Lungo, Gabriella and Elena Tognini (eds.) Academic Discourse: New Insights into Evaluation. Bern: Peter Lang, 13–30.
[16] Hyland, Ken (2005) Metadiscourse. London: Continuum.
[17] Hyland, Ken and Polly Tse (2005) 'Hooking the reader: a corpus study of evaluative that in abstracts'. English for Specific Purposes 24 (2), 123–139. | DOI 10.1016/j.esp.2004.02.002
[18] Koutsantoni, Dimitra (2004) 'Attitude, certainty and allusions to common knowledge in scientific research articles'. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 3, 163–182. | DOI 10.1016/j.jeap.2003.08.001
[19] Martín-Martín, Pedro and Sally Burgess (2004) 'The rhetorical management of academic criticism in research article abstracts'. Text 24, 171–195.
[20] Latour, Bruno, and Steve Wolgar (1979) Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. Beverly Hills, Ca.: Sage.
[21] Lorés-Sanz, Rosa (2009) '(Non-) Critical voices in the reviewing of history discourse: A cross-cultural study of evaluation'. In: Hyland, Ken and Giuliana Diani (eds.) Academic evaluation: Review genres in university settings. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 143–160.
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[23] Moreno, Ana and Lorena Suárez (2008) 'A study of critical attitude across English and Spanish academic book reviews'. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 7, 15–26. | DOI 10.1016/j.jeap.2008.02.009
[24] Mur-Dueñas, Pilar (2010) 'Attitude markers in business management research articles: a cross-cultural corpus-driven approach'. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 20 (1), 50–72. | DOI 10.1111/j.1473-4192.2009.00228.x
[25] Shaw, Philip (2003) 'Evaluation and promotion across languages'. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 2, 343–357. | DOI 10.1016/S1475-1585(03)00050-X
[26] Soler, Viviana (2002) 'Analysing adjectives in scientific discourse: an exploratory study with educational applications for Spanish speakers at advanced university level'. English for Specific Purposes 21, 145–165. | DOI 10.1016/S0889-4906(00)00034-X
[27] Stotesbury, Hilkka (2003) 'Evaluation in research article abstracts in the narrative and hard sciences'. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 2, 327–341. | DOI 10.1016/S1475-1585(03)00049-3
[28] Swales, John and Amy Burke (2003) '"It's really fascinating work": Differences in evaluative adjectives across academic registers'. 3rd North American Symposium on Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching. New York: Rodopi, 1–18.
[29] Thetela, Puleng (1997) 'Evaluated entities and parameters of value in academic research articles'. English for Specific Purposes 16, 101–118. | DOI 10.1016/S0889-4906(96)00022-1
[30] Thompson, Geoff and Susan Hunston (2001) 'Evaluation: An Introduction'. In: Hunston, Susan and Geoff Thomson (eds.) Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1–27.