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Part of
Persuasion in Public Discourse: Cognitive and functional perspectives
Edited by Jana Pelclová and Wei-lun Lu
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 79] 2018
► pp. 259–278

Chapter 11
Promotional strategies in academic writing

Statements of contribution in Spanish and ELF research articles

Written academic discourse has been shown to be highly persuasive, as scholars need to convince readers of the validity and relevance of their research making use of interpersonal strategies which are appropriate to the specific communities. Based on genre analysis (Bhatia 2004; Swales 2004) and taking an intercultural perspective (Connor 2004), this chapter seeks to explore statements of contribution as a promotional strategy in research articles in business management intended to persuade readers of the novelty and significance of the research presented. A comparable corpus of English articles published in international journals by scholars from varied linguacultural backgrounds using English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and Spanish articles published in national journals was analyzed in terms of the use of this persuasive practice. The results indicate that its use is influenced by the different expectations and conventions in the two languages and contexts of publication, and contributes to establishing a different writer-reader relationship.
Keywords: intercultural rhetoric, interpersonality, promotional strategies, academic discourse, English for Academic Purposes (EAP), English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), genre analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methods: Corpus and analytical procedure
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Quantitative analysis of statements of contribution in ELF and Spanish articles
    • 3.2Qualitative analysis of statements of contribution in ELF and Spanish articles
  • 4.Final remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 8 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.79.12mur
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