Generic Traits in Research Articles

The present analysis aims to provide a workable framework and analytical parameters against which to measure generic prototypicality and variation in research articles (RAs) from different disciplinary domains, namely Applied Linguistics (ApL), Economics (Eco), Law (Law) and Medicine (Med). The investigation is based on the assumption that, besides genre-related conventions, there are also subject-area related factors which influence the construction of a text. As a matter of fact, for hard-knowledge disciplines scientific validity depends on empirically demonstrable truths, for most soft-knowledge sciences effectiveness is measured by the correspondence between speculative aspects and quantifiable data tested through corpus-based frequency counts, mathematical calculations etc., whereas the worth of other disciplines such as legal studies relies mostly on abstract reasoning and on the discussion of legal principles and their possible relevance to practical cases. In such cases, where persuasion does not benefit from quantitative measurements, generic moves and rhetorical strategies aimed at presenting and discussing knowledge claims acquire a crucial role. The main purpose of this paper is to identify the main linguistic and textual features which may be considered typical and distinctive of RAs in the various disciplines both at the level of text-structure and discursive organization (i.e. introduction of the main topic, sequencing of the argumentation, cognitive connections between the main points, etc.), and at the syntactic and interpersonal levels (i.e. evaluative and epistemic markers, etc.). The material used for these analyses consists of 400 English RAs (100 articles per discipline) mostly taken from CADIS (Bergamo Corpus of Academic Discourse, cf. Gotti 2006; D’Angelo 2008).