Personal Attribution in English and Spanish Scientific Texts

Scientific discourse is usually thought to be impersonal. In fact, most style manuals encourage academics to use impersonal constructions in order to avoid making explicit their authorial presence in the texts. However, recent research has shown that in scientific writing the choice to announce the writer’s presence in the discourse, mainly by means of the use of first person pronouns, is a rhetorical strategy frequently used by the members of the international English-speaking community for promotion and gaining accreditation for research claims. In this study, I have analysed the distribution and frequency of occurrence of first person pronouns in research article abstracts written in English and Spanish in the social sciences disciplines, in an attempt to reveal whether there is cross-linguistic variation in the use of personal attribution in the texts. I have also examined the possible semantic references and different socio-pragmatic functions that these pronouns may perform. The results showed a high tendency to impersonality in both languages. This indicates that most academics in English and Spanish favour strategies of depersonalisation: the use of agentless passive and impersonal constructions, which function as hedging devices that diminish the author’s presence in the texts, avoiding personal responsibility for their claims

Scientific Writing: A Universal or a Culture-Specific Type of Discourse?

Studies of cross-cultural rhetorical variation, and how the influence of the cul- ture and the linguistic and structural aspects of a person's L1 may affect his/her writing in an L2, are often labelled Contrastive Rhetoric research. This paper reviews the field of Contrastive Rhetoric (CR) with a special focus on academic/scientific and professional contexts. A revision of Kaplan's (1966) pio- neering work in CR, and the subsequent criticism it has received, is followed by a comprehensive overview of how this area of research has evolved in recent years, and by a survey of the latest variables which are being considered in contemporary CR research. On the basis of the results obtained in these CR studies, this paper discusses the issue of whether scientific discourse is universal or whether it is culture-specific, i.e. governed by socio-cultural factors.

The teaching of academic writing to English as a second language students: A functional genre-based approach

This paper reviews how genre-based pedagogy has been conceived by researchers in the different scholarly traditions, and offers a particular view of genre-driven pedagogy and its practical applications in the English as a Second Language student classroom. This view of a genre-based teaching approach largely consists in a prior discussion with students of the socio-cultural context in which a particular academic genre occurs. This discovery process of the social circumstances that surround a genre can help students understand more readily the communicative purpose of a specific genre. A second complementary stage should be the explicit teaching of functions and language structures of typical academic texts, with a special emphasis on cross-cultural variation. By making learners aware of the similarities and differences in the rhetorical strategies preferred by the members of different disciplinary communities, L2 writers may feel more confident about the rhetorical options they can choose depending on the context and type of audience they are addressing.

Discurso pronunciado por Pedro Martín y Martín ..., en la grandiosa asamblea preparatoria de la constitución de la Confederación Hidrográfica del Duero, celebrada el día 20 de marzo de 1927 en el Teatro de Calderón, de Valladolid...

Copia digital. Valladolid : Junta de Castilla y León. Consejería de Cultura y Turismo, 2009-201