A Discursive-Rhetoric Model for the Research Article Genre in Law: The Academic Discourse on Equality in National Legal Doctrine

Abstract

Legal research paper is a genre widely used by experts in the legal community. However, empiric rhetoric-discursive descriptions of the features in legal writing for the Spanish speaking community and, especially, the Chilean community are scarce, despite its relevance. Therefore, the objective is to describe the rhetoric-discursive organization of this genre inserted in the academic discourse in the legal science field to expand the knowledge of the written production at a rhetoric level. A Swalesian Genre Analysis was carried out to fulfill the objective, and a microcorpus of 25 texts was collected from a larger ecological corpus that gathered academic productions of domestic teaching related to the principle of equality. The analysis identified macromoves, moves and rhetorical steps, communicative functions, and text features. The resulting rhetorical model was formed by 3 macromoves, 8 moves and 15 steps. The argumentation core is that macromove is crucial to understand how dogmatic people build their discourse about the principle of equality, mainly using authority, concept, and pragmatic arguments based on knowledge and logos. Some rhetoric patterns are described as preferred by the discursive community. Finally, the results provide useful information for genre theory, description of the Spanish language in specialized fields, and discourse studies of the legal community.