Value Marking in an Academic Genre: When Authors Signal ‘Goodness’

Instrumental to the knowledge-construction process embedded in research writing is the use of evaluative expressions signalling aspects that are viewed as desirable (or undesirable). While the linguistic resources encoding such claims are dealt with extensively in the literature, only a few authors (cf. Thetela 1997; Swales/Burke 2003; Pèrez-Llantada 2008; Giannoni 2010; Breeze 2011) have turned their attention to the value system that informs academic evaluation. As a contribution in this direction, a corpus-based procedure for the analysis of value-marking lexis was developed and applied to the most prominent academic genre, i.e. the research article. It combines quantitative and qualitative tools, concordancer data and manual investigation of texts. To illustrate its findings, the present paper describes how authors from different disciplinary cultures signal the value of ‘goodness’ (a broad axiological category qualifying aspects viewed as positive/negative by the community). The lexical items encoding this variable were investigated using a 1 m word corpus drawn from leading journals in anthropology, biology, computer science, economics, engineering, history, mathematics, medicine, physics and sociology. Like other axiological variables, goodness is a mental/social object integral to the knowlege claims made in academic writing and its marking across disciplines exhibits considerable quantitative variation, as well as functional and referential divergences. The examples presented here show that, within a common generic framework, disciplinary cultures drawn differenly on a range of (largely unqualified) axiological variables to muster epistemological consensus on key aspects of their practices.