Email this article Re-Mediation of Academic Knowledge: Reporting and Evaluating Prior Research in Archaeology Abstracts
Abstract
The aim of the present study is to analyse a corpus of 163 research article abstracts in archaeology, an academic domain which, so far, has encountered little attention by linguists. The abstracts and the accompanying articles were published between 2007 and 2012 in the quarterly issues of three leading journals in the field, i.e. the Journal of Archaeological Research, the Cambridge Archaeological Journal and the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, which rank at the first three places in the SCOPUS database for the domain of archaeology. The study investigates the way archaeology abstracts report prior research, including the presence/absence of implicit/explicit evaluation, how archaeology authors structure this evaluation, the linguistic expressions they use, the place occupied by evaluation of prior research in the in the abstract’s rhetorical macrostructure. Results from the present work are analysed against already existing research on other academic disciplines in order to collocate archaeology along the disciplines’ continuum that includes the hard and the soft sciences at its extremes. Data show that abstracts in archaeology, as in other disciplines, tend to avoid open confrontationality, favouring criticism toward abstract entities.
References
Berkenkotter C., Huckin T. 1995, Genre knowledge in disciplinary communication, NJ Laurence Erlbaum, Hillsdale.
Bhatia V. K. 1993, Analysing genre: language use in professional settings, Longman, London.
Brown P., Levinson S. 1987, Politeness. Some Universals in Language Use, Cambridge University Press Cambridge.
Cava A. M., Venuti, M. 2008 The Good Me or the Bad Me? Identity and Evaluation in Research Articles Abstracts, in “Linguistica e Filologia” 27, pp. 139-156.
Cesiri D. 2012a, Research Genres and Hybridisation: a Case Study from Research Articles in the Field of Cultural Heritage Studies, in Maci S. M., Sala M. (eds.), Effects of Genre Variation in Academic Communication. Disciplinary Emerging Trends, CELSB, Bergamo, vol. 1, pp. 107-133.
Cesiri D. 2012b, Investigating the development of ESP through historical corpora: the case of Archaeology articles written in English during the Late Modern period (and beyond?), in Tyrkkö J. et al. (eds.), Outposts of Historical Corpus Linguistics: From the Helsinki Corpus to a Proliferation of Resources, Research Unit for Variation, Contacts, and Change in English, Helsinki, vol. 10, pp. 1-21.
Cesiri D. forthcoming, Pedagogical implications of evaluation in academic domains: praise and criticism in archaeology book reviews, in Bianchi F., Gesuato, S. (eds.), Pragmatic issues in specialized communicative contexts, Brill.
Hunston S., Thompson G. (eds.), 1999, Evaluation in Text. Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Hyland, K. 2000, Disciplinary discourses. Social interactions in academic writing, Michigan University Press, Ann Arbor.
Hyland, K. 2008, Persuasion, Interactions and the Construction of Knowledge: Representing Self and others in Research Writing, in “International Journal of English Studies” 8 [2], pp. 1-23.
Hyland K., Tse, P. 2009, ‘The Leading Journal in its Field’: Evaluation in Journal Descriptions, in “Discourse Studies” 11 [6], pp. 703-720.
Kaplan R. B., Cantor S., Hagstrom C., Kamhi-Stein L. D., Shiotani, Y., Zimmerman, C. B. 1994, On abstract writing, “Text & Talk” 14 [3], pp. 401-426.
Martin J. K., White P. R. R. 2005, The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndsmills/New York.
Pho P. D. 2008, Research article abstracts in applied linguistics and educational technology: a study of linguistic realizations of rhetorical structure and authorial stance, in “Discourse Studies” 10 [2], pp. 231-250.
Salager-Meyer F. 1992, A text-type and move analysis of study verb tense and modality distribution in medical English abstracts, in “English for Specific Purposes” 13 [2], pp. 149-170.
Stotesbury H. 2003, Evaluation in research article abstracts in the narrative and hard sciences, in “Journal of English for Academic Purposes” 2, pp. 327-341.
Stotesbury, H. 2006, From interdisciplinary to intradisciplinary and beyond: subfield-specific differences within research article abstracts in Economic sciences, in Bhatia, V. K., Gotti, M. (eds.), Explorations in Specialized Genres, Peter Lang, Bern, 79-97.
Swales, J. M. 1990. Genre analysis. English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Swales, J. M. 2004. Research Genres. Explorations and applications. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Full Text: pdf
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
