El discurso científico de la historia: Análisis estructural y retórico de los artículos de investigación en historia

Abstract

As in all scientific disciplines, the general discourse of history is conveyed by means of different discourse genres. One of such genres is the research article (RA), which therefore enables the analysis of the scientific discourse of history. In this respect, the descriptive work of Swales (1990, 2004) and his theory of Rhetorical Moves (RM) is seminal to the study of scientific research articles. The studies based on this theory have been published mostly in English and involve the analysis of some of the distinctive super-structural sections, mainly the introduction and the conclusion, in a discrete approach. The aim of the present study is to describe, both structurally and rhetorically, research articles in the area of history written in Chilean Spanish. To this end, an analysis was carried out of the superstructures present in the RA's of our corpus. Additionally, the prototypical RM's in history RA's were identified and the degree of similarity between these super-structural sections in our corpus and those of other disciplines was established. The main results of this study demonstrate that research articles in the area of history are characterized, mainly, by the narration and interpretation of facts, together with the literal reference to other sources. (English) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]