Chapter 4. Academic and professional genres

This chapter focuses on describing the largest available on-line corpora (59 million words) of written specialized Spanish on four disciplines: Psychology, Social Work, Industrial Chemistry, and Construction Engineering. The corpora were collected in one Chilean university and in the corresponding professional settings. The corpus description shows that access to disciplinary knowledge is constructed, on the one hand, through a varying repertoire of nine written academic genres. On the other hand, a larger group of twenty-eight professional genres is detected. Interesting variations across the four disciplines under study are identified.