A contribution to the interdisciplinary contrastive study of writers' rhetorical strategies in contemporary research articles in English

The research presented here aimed at the contrastive interdisciplinary analysis of the use of interpersonal features in academic research articles belonging to four different and well defined areas of knowledge: Applied Linguistics, Business Management, Urology and Food Technology. The underlying assumption for this study is that scholars drafting their research for publication need to take into account the key role which their respective disciplinary audiences play in the acceptance and ratification of the writers claims. More specifically, in order to facilitate the publication of their work, RA authors have been reported to employ particular interpersonal rhetorical resources in their texts. In connection to this hypothesis, this thesis seeks to provide answers for the following research questions: 1. How common are interpersonal rhetorical strategies in academic research articles? 2. In what ways does the incidence of interpersonal rhetorical strategies vary across different disciplines? 3. Which epistemological, ideological or social aspects can help us to explain disciplinary differences in the use of interpersonal rhetorical strategies? 4. Which are the preferred purposes for which metadiscourse strategies are used across different areas of knowledge? Corpus analysis was chosen as the research methodology for investigating the way the writing of academic RAs is shaped by the cultures and discourse communities within which it takes place. Moreover, I relied on data collected from ethnographic interviews, which was expected to complement and illuminate corpus based data. The results obtained in my study clearly support the hypothesis that there exists considerable disciplinary variation in the frequency and distribution of the various categories of interpersonal metadiscourse across different disciplines. In addition, it has been found that the use of rhetorical resources is linked to a complex interplay of factors related to the new communicative needs and social requirements placed on the RA genre.