Mapping Academic Values in the Disciplines

A broad strand of applied linguistic research has focused on the language of science and scholarship, stressing its role in the construction and negotiation of knowledge claims. Central to the success of such texts is the use of evaluative expressions encoding what is considered to be desirable or undesirable in a given domain. While the speech acts relevant to evaluation have been extensively researched, little is known of the underlying values they encode. This volume seeks to fill the gap by exploring the main facets of academic value in a corpus of research articles from leading journals in anthropology, biology, computer science, economics, engineering, history, mathematics, medicine, physics and sociology. The collocations and qualified entities associated with such variables in the corpus provide insights into how scholars draw on a repertoire of conventional, largely unqualified, axiological meanings instrumental to the production of new knowledge in their field.

Autorentext

The Author: Davide Simone Giannoni is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Bergamo (Italy). He holds a doctorate in Applied Linguistics from the University of Reading (UK) and an M.A. in Linguistics-tesol from the University of Surrey (UK). His research on academic-professional genres has appeared in several international journals and volumes. He has co-edited New Trends in Specialized Discourse Analysis (2006), Identity Traits in English Academic Discourse (2008) and Researching Language and the Law (2010).

Inhalt

Contents: Academia and the disciplines - Discourse communities - Academic English and ELF - The values of academia - Goodness markers - Size markers - Novelty markers - Relevance markers - Evaluative lexis and value markers - Academic values signalled in the corpus - Lexical resources encoding value - Variation among qualified entities - The role of academic values.