Academic and professional genre variation across four disciplines: exploring the PUCV-2006 corpus of written Spanish

Abstract

The elusive concepts underlying the word genre offer different alternative conceptions. This may produce confusions but identifying the theoretical frameworks help in understanding the possible preliminary doubts of the novice. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), New Rhetoric (NR), Semiolinguistics (SL), Communicative Procedural Text Linguistics (CPL), Interdisciplinary Text Linguistics (ITL), and Genre Analysis (GA), among others, are all theoretical propositions that represent options to be explored. In this paper, a discussion of the contemporary conceptions of discourse genre will be presented. My own perspective will also be a particular focus, but with special emphasis on findings from empirical data. The research is based upon the largest available on-line corpus (58 million words) of written specialized Spanish on four disciplines: Psychology, Social Work, Industrial Chemistry, and Construction Engineering. The corpus was collected in one Chilean university and the corresponding professional settings. The corpus description shows that access to disciplinary knowledge is constructed through a varying repertoire of written genres depending on disciplinary domain and on academic or professional field. Psycholinguistic and educational implications are advanced in relation to knowledge acquisition, discourse genres and reading comprehension.

Análise multidimensional de um corpus multinível de aprendizes de língua inglesa

“…Uma abordagem para análise de corpus que usa procedimentos estatísticos (principalmente análise fatorial), visando ao mapeamento das associações entre um conjunto variado de características dentro do corpus de estudo. Vários estudos baseados em corpora com a metodologia AMD já foram feitos em diversas línguas, tais como: na Língua Inglesa Crossley;Louwerse, 2007;De Mönnik;Brom;Oostdijk, 2003;Lee, 2000), coreano (Kim;, somali Hared, 1994), nuklaelae tuvalan (Bressnier, 1988), gaélico (Lamb, 2008), espanhol Davis;Jones;Tracy-Ventura, 2006, Parodi, 2007 e o português (Berber-Sardinha; Kauffmann; Acunzo, 2012;2014a;2014b).…”

Latin-American writing initiatives in engineering from Spanish-speaking countries

“…As happens in the U.S. scholarship, there is an interest reported by some of the Latin-American publications in pursuing research agendas for providing information about transitions and overlapping practices between industry and academia (Bernhardt, 2002;Parodi, 2010;Natale, 2015;Natale & Stagnaro, 2015). One of the Latin-American publications analyzed stresses as a limitation that teaching professional genres is artiicial (Natale, 2015), and in three cases the publications claim for bridging academic writing practices and professional writing practices (Parodi, 2010a;Natale & Stagnro, 2015;Natale, 2015).…”