The rhetorical management of academic criticism in research article abstracts

Abstract

In order to justify publication, the writers of scientific texts must create a research space that allows them to present new knowledge claims to the other members of the discourse community. This implies the use of a number of rhetorical strategies which involve the criticism of members of their own academic community. This article explores the interpersonal pragmatic phenomenon of academic criticism (AC) from a crosslinguistic perspective in research article abstracts. To this end, we have analyzed the various rhetorical options that writers may use to convey critical speech acts, in a corpus of 160 research paper abstracts written in English and Spanish in two disciplines (phonetics and psychology) of the social sciences. The results showed that the overall frequency of occurrence of instances of academic criticism is higher in the English abstracts, and that in the English texts, the writers preferred to convey criticism in an impersonal and indirect way, whereas in the Spanish texts, the writers opted more frequently for the use of personal and direct AC. The reason for this rhetorical variation is mainly explained by the influence of the sociopragmatic context of publication, that is, the relationship between the writers and the discourse community they are addressing, which is different both in terms of size and pressure.

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