Lithuanian academic discourse revisited: Features and patterns of scientific communication

Abstract

Over the past several decades, there has been an increasing interest in academic discourse investigations with a specific focus on disciplinary, cultural, and generic aspects of academic text construction. Studies of Spanish, Italian, Greek, Portuguese, French, German, and Russian (inter alia) academic discourse have revealed not only the universal features characteristic of many writing cultures, but also unique rhetorical features, typical of only some of them. In this article, we focus on academic discourse investigations in scientific texts written in one of the lesser-studied languages, Lithuanian. We review here studies of Lithuanian scientific discourse and what those studies reveal about the specific features of Lithuanian academic discourse. The first part of the article identifies how rhetorical structures differ between English and Lithuanian academic texts, whereas the second part presents a comprehensive overview of the functional groups of linguistic units, such as metadiscourse markers, stance and engagement markers, and conceptual metaphors, and how these are different or similar to English academic discourse. The overview of the empirical studies shows the current state of knowledge about Lithuanian academic discourse and highlights some of the items that distinguish Lithuanian writing. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of identifying academic writing traditions of other languages to acknowledge diversity.

Metadiscourse in Lithuanian linguistics research articles: A study of interactive and interactional features

“…Estonian, Latvian, Persian, Arabic), considerable attention has been devoted to the exploration of interpersonal relationships in academic texts written in English (Hyland 2005a;2005b;Ädel 2010;Hyland & Jiang 2016;2018). As a result, the Anglo-American tradition of writing often becomes a point of departure for analyzing MD in other languages and socio-cultural contexts (Ruskan et al 2023).…”

Cross-linguistic patterns of metadiscourse: Disciplinary similarities and section-based differences

“…Conversely, the interactional dimension, which includes hedges, boosters, attitudinal markers, self-mentions, and engagement markers, mirrors the intention of the author to involve the reader in the text (Hyland et al 2022, Hyland, Tse 2004). As such, at the macro level, i.e., at the whole text level, the use or lack of use of these metadiscourse markers can offer a snapshot of how the text and the author interact with the reader and, more specifically, where in the text, as has been highlighted by (Ruskan et al 2023). Building upon this framework, the present study empirically explores the use of metadiscourse markers across two languages: Estonian and Lithuanian, found across various published journal articles in the discipline of linguistics to 1) compare the global use of all the metadiscourse markers across the languages and texts, making distinctions between these languages and specific academic journals, and 2) discern whether similar and/or different patterns can be identified across the languages and whether such patterns also manifest across various academic journals.…”

“…This study builds upon a prior investigation (Hint et al 2022, Ruskan et al 2023, which identified metadiscourse markers across 21 journal articles (seven journal articles belonging to three specified journals in the field of linguistics). This work is part of a larger project aiming to uncover the rhetorical structures of academic texts in Estonian and Lithuanian (Jürine et al 2021, Leijen et al, Forthcoming).…”