Introduction

Abstract

The intersection of cultural studies and analysis of academic discourses is today drawing more and more attention among linguists, educationists, and professional researchers in many disciplines. Among the reasons for this are: transformations in the philosophical stance regarding language, texts, and communicants; increase in cross-cultural contacts and growing awareness of the role of language in disseminating knowledge and in giving meaning to relations among individuals and groups; changes in educational views and policies, including in particular advancements in genre-based pedagogy for native and nonnative writers in research and academic settings. Intellectual, practical, and social considerations conspire to imbue such issues with profound scientific and social relevance.The current state of the art in the field of contrastive academic rhetoric would not have been possible without a change of perspective on language and the nature of scientific communication. Natural language has long been seen as an enemy of scientific exposition. This has not made it any easier to view academic writing in communicative terms, let alone in a cross-cultural perspective. The main problem was -and is, for that matter -the delicate nature of the field of science and scholarship: the sacrum of knowledge and truth is at the mercy of a medium that is profane, and a user who is fallible. For the sake of scientific purity and veracity, a plain and impersonal language was recommended -a language devoid of emotional and interpersonal meanings, of fuzzy expressions, and of intellectual or attitudinal bias. All this contributed to the image of a dehumanized language of science, and likewise to the image of a dehumanized writer/reader. Since people acting as scholars were expected to separate the scientific from the human, uniformity of academic writing styles was taken for granted, and was accounted for in terms of objectivized research standards.The emergence and subsequent rapid development of modern text linguistics and discourse analysis envisaged the communicative potential of the language of science as well as its variation across fields and cultures. The line and the pace of such renewed interest in academic communication patterns was strongly influenced by the general evolution of processual, strategic, dynamic, and interactive models of discourse organization Brought to you by | Nanyang Technological University Authenticated Download Date | 6/17/15 11:07 AM 2 Anna Duszak and discourse processing. Focus on language was superseded by focus on text and discourse characteristics that were then correlated with human properties.Within the last ten years or so extensive work has been done on academic discourse patterns in mono-and multicultural contexts. Cross-cultural variation has been noted in at least the following areas of discourse organization: global and local structures in texts; levels of explicitness and metatextual cuing; degrees of redundancy and distribution of salience; and linearity and complexity in form and conten...

The academic writing experiences of a group of student nurses: a phenomenological study

“…In the case of an academic style, one is referring to the systematically imposed and prescriptively defined processes associated with academic writing (Duszak 1997, Chapman 1997, Lenehan & Zimmerman 1999). If the principle components of an academic `scholarly' style are broken down, they are represented as writing, reading, thinking and dialogue (Diekelmann & Ironside 1998).…”

The very first sentence in research article introductions: A rhetoric comparative approach

“…As far as the field in which these RA are published, we chose the linguistics and translation fields because “writings in the humanities and social sciences evidence more prominent variation. In these research fields, communication styles respond most strongly to language- and culture-bound discoursal preferences and constraints” ( Duszak 1997 : 11).…”

“…The rhetoric, stylistic and textual properties of research articles (RAs) written in different languages have been the focus of many studies across the world (e.g. Swales 1990 , 2004 for English; Najjar 1990 for Arabic; Mauranen 1993 for Finish; Fredrickson and Swales 1994 for Swedish; Ahmad 1997 for Malay; Duszak 1997 for Polish, Mur-Dueñas 2010 for Spanish among others) 1 . In these works, every section of RAs is independently explored: introductions (e.g.…”

Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis of Evidentiality in PHD Dissertations

“…Some possible explanations can be given also for the authors' tendency to use markers denoting a low degree of reliability and to convey a low degree of commitment to the validity of the proposition. The data of the present study consists of dissertation discussions refl ecting the conventions of academic writing (Hyland 2005a(Hyland , 2011, although there may be diff erences in academic writing conventions (Duszak 1997). Academic texts provide ideas that are falsifi able by the very nature of scientifi c research.…”