A contrastive study of generic integrity in the use of attitudinal evaluation in research articles written for different audiences

Abstract

In today's competitive world of academia, besides offering innovative and robust results, writing scholars must strategically deploy attitudinal evaluation to convince editors and reviewers that their research is valuable and worth publishing. Yet the use of these rhetorical resources can vary across different disciplines, languages and cultures. In addition, the audience for which authors are writing their research (local or international) can significantly influence the way attitudinal evaluation is used. My corpus consists of 72 research articles (RAs) published internationally in English in three different disciplines (Applied Linguistics, Business Management and Food Technology). A parallel corpus of 36 RAs published locally in Spanish in the same three disciplines has been used as a control group with the aim of establishing whether their different cultures/languages and the different degrees of competitiveness can determine the way attitudinal markers are used. Manual and electronic analyses have been combined to identify and quantify attitudinal markers in the texts. These markers were classified according to several parameters such as the entity evaluated (Thetela 1997), the type of value expressed and the subject receiving the evaluation. The results for the two sub-corpora were then statistically treated to allow us to find patterns through quantitative contrastive analysis. The results have shown that, besides significant disciplinary variation in the amount of attitudinal markers used, RA authors use evaluative strategies differently depending on the context of publication. Promoting the significance of one's work seems to be a more important strategy in order to get it published internationally, specially within the most competitive and urban disciplinary fields. Despite being generally regarded as belonging to the same genre, locally published RAs clearly deviate from international RAs in the use of these features, which suggests it may constitute a different subgenre with its own generic integrity.