Academic and Professional Discourse Genres in Spanish

“Over the past 20 years, there has been an explosion of corpus-based studies of discourse. However, most of those studies have focused on the analysis of English-language corpora, and this is especially true of the studies that have been published in English. As a result, we currently know surprisingly little about the corpus-based study of linguistic variation in languages other than English. The present book takes a major step towards filling this gap in previous research, providing detailed corpus-based descriptions of genre variation in Spanish, one of the most widely-spoken languages of the world. The descriptions focus on written discourse in four major disciplines: psychology, social work, industrial chemistry, and construction engineering. However, unlike most previous studies, the research here further distinguishes between academic and professional discourse, and explicitly compares the linguistic patterns of use between the two domains.”

“This edited collection of corpus-based multidimensional descriptions of genre variation in Spanish has all the advantages of a single-authored study and much more; it offers analyses of the same corpus by a team of researchers driven by the same single-minded concerns for rigour and comprehensiveness. Parodi and his collaborators, in this inspiring volume, provide an insightful model for the analysis of construction, interpretation and use of academic and professional genres.”

“With this volume the authors present not only the largest and most carefully designed corpus of academic and professional writing in the world, but deploy state-of-the-art computational techniques to interpret Spanish discourse, further enriched by qualitative analysis. An intellectual tour de force from their internationally renowned centre for corpus linguistics research.”

“Everyone knows that the meaning of language and discourse depends on context, but this is a jaded, trivial claim without a systematic analysis of the constraints of context. Parodi’s book moves us a giant step forward by exploring a couple dozen genres in tour academic disciplines. One of the sins of many areas of language and discourse studies is to cherry-pick the texts in order to bolster pet claims that a researcher passionately wants to defend. Such an approach is neither science nor informative scholarship. This book lies at the other end of the continuum by performing a corpus analysis of nearly 500 texts and 60 million words that cover a large landscape of genre and disciplines in academia and professional settings.”