Knowledge Construction and Knowledge Promotion in Academic Communication: The Case of Research Article Abstracts: A Corpus-based Study

As a highly standardized genre in academic communication (Salager-Meyer 1990, Cross/Oppenheim 2006, Swales/Feak 2009, Bondi 2010) research article abstracts (RAABs) are meant to point to and reflect the related research article (RA) both at the representational (i.e. by introducing the main theme and/or the problematic aspects which are going to be discussed) and the rhetorical-argumentative level (i.e. by mirroring the cognitive organization of the ensuing text and respecting conventionalized structural parameters which are distinctive of and recognizable within the relevant disciplinary domain). Given its pragmatic character as an anticipatory resource to the associated RA, the RAAB has a marked descriptive and promotional character, being primarily meant to elicit the reader’s interest: in this sense, its effectiveness is proportionally related to the degree of conformity to the epistemological standards, requirements and constraints which are typical of the relevant discipline (i.e. how to express either/both objectivity or/and meaning negotiability, assertiveness or/and defensiveness, authoritativeness or/and cooperation, etc.). On the ground of the above, this paper analyses the way knowledge is conceptualized and constructed in the genre of RAAB by focusing on three lexico-semantic macro-categories which are used to represent and characterize the scientific activity, that is, as act of research, interpretation or discourse. Based on a corpus of 200 RA abstracts taken from CADIS (Gotti 2006, 2012), and published between the years 2000 and 2010 in four disciplinary areas (linguistics, law, economics and medicine), this investigation focuses primarily on the verb or verbal phrases (both in terms of word-choice and of modality, tense and aspect) and phraseological constructions which are conventionally employed to lexicalize the knowledge objects, the roles and the activities of the scientific act, thus connecting a given academic discipline to a recognizable domain-specific epistemological frame.