Abstracts in Academic Discourse

The book brings together a rich variety of perspectives on abstracts as an academic genre. Drawing on genre analysis and corpus linguistics, the studies collected here combine attention to generic structure with emphasis on language variation and change, thus offering a multi-perspective view on a genre that is becoming one of the most important in present-day research communication. The chapters are organized into three sections, each one offering distinct but sometimes combined perspectives on the exploration of this academic genre. The first section looks at variation across cultures through studies comparing English with Spanish, Italian and German, while also including considerations on variation across genders or the native/non-native divide. The second section centres on variation across disciplines and includes a wide range of studies exploring disciplinary identities and communities, as well as different degrees of centrality in the disciplinary community. The third and final section explores language and genre change by looking at how authorial voice and metadiscourse have changed over the past few decades under the influence of different media and different stakeholders.

Auteur

Marina Bondi is Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where she is also Director of the CLAVIER (Corpus and Language Variation in English Research) centre. She has published on various aspects of discourse analysis, genre analysis, argumentation, metadiscourse, evaluative language and corpus approaches to specialised discourse.
Rosa Lorés-Sanz is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and German Studies of the University of Zaragoza. She has edited books and published articles in national and international journals on pragmatics and translation, and corpus and contrastive studies (English- Spanish) applied to academic and specialized languages. She is a member of the research group InterLAE.

Contenu

Contents: Francisco Alonso-Almeida: Evidential and Epistemic Devices in English and Spanish Medical, Computing and Legal Scientific Abstracts: A Contrastive Study - Ines Busch-Lauer: Abstracts: Cross-linguistic, Disciplinary and Intercultural Perspectives - Giuliana Diani: On English and Italian Research Article Abstracts: Genre Variation Across Cultures - Rosa Lorés Sanz: Lost (and Gained) in Translation: A Contrastive (English/Spanish) Analysis of Rhetorical and Lexicogrammatical Patterns in Sociology Research Article Abstracts - Andrzej Lyda/Krystyna Warchal: Gender and Academicity: Insights from Research Article Abstracts - Geneviève Bordet: Influence of Collocational Variations on Making the PhD Abstract an Effective «Would-be Insider» Self-promotional Tool - Silvia Cavalieri: Variation Across Disciplines. The Case of Applied Linguistics and Medicine - Anna-Maria Hatzitheodorou: A Genre-oriented Analysis of Research Article Abstracts in Law and Business Journals - Michele Sala: Research Article Abstracts as Domain-specific Epistemological Indicators. A Corpus-based Study - Françoise Salager Meyer/María Ángeles Alcaraz Ariza/Beverly Lewin: Abstract Quality in Complementary and Alternative Medicine Papers: A Structural and Cross-Generic Analysis - Marina Bondi: Changing Voices: Authorial Voice in Abstracts - Paul Gillaerts: Shifting Metadiscourse: Looking for Diachrony in the Abstract Genre - Akiko Okamura/Philip Shaw: Development of Academic Journal Abstracts in Relation to the Demands of Stakeholders.