1.1 Introduction
Those of us interested in academic discourse have seen the field evolve in recent years. The current canon is expansive and includes a wealth of studies crossing genres, registers, modes, and languages. We see studies of textual minutiae that focus on lexical and grammatical items in global academic contexts and we see a focus on both the text and context that considers writers, their discourse, and the roles of dialogue and metadiscourse for communicating within the global academy. Unsurprisingly, such research is dominated by a focus on the English language, given its privileged role for academic communication, and there is relatively little research available on academic languages other than English. In considering the communicative and interactive nature of academic texts, the growing body knowledge in evaluation and metadiscourse is of note, and within this, concepts such as writer stance and reader engagement seek to investigate how the social and dialogic nature of texts are enacted linguistically. Of course, despite this growth, there remain areas of intrigue worthy of further investigation. Most notable among them is reader engagement, which is concerned with how readers are included, exploited, and positioned in texts, using engagement markers like reader pronouns and questions. The work presented in this book touches on each of these facets of contemporary academic discourse research, by discussing questions as reader-engaging metadiscourse and their use in economics academic writing in English, French, and Spanish.
More specifically, this book is based on a corpus-based contrastive analysis, using data created for this project and from the KIAP corpus – Kulturell Identitet i Akademisk Prosa, which in English translates as Cultural Identity in Academic Writing (Fløttum et al. 2006). KIAP is a multilingual comparable corpus composed of 450 research articles, with 150 each in English, French, and Norwegian. These research articles are subcategorised according to discipline with 50 in linguistics, economics, and medicine in each language. This study draws on the English and French economics subcorpora from the KIAP corpus. For the Spanish data, I compiled a comparable Spanish economics subcorpus, named specon. Together these three subcorpora make up KIAP-EEFS, which represents KIAP economics English, French, and Spanish. KIAP-EEFS can be described as a multilingual, comparable, and specialised corpus, and is discussed in detail in Chapter 4. Using these data, the main aim of the research presented herein is to investigate the following two key questions:
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To what extent does the presence of questions as reader engagement correspond in English, French, and Spanish economics research articles?
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To what extent does the function of questions as reader engagement correspond in English, French, and Spanish economics research articles?
Upon initial consideration, one might think that an investigation of questions across languages is a simple process of question retrieval, juxtaposition, and analysis. Of course, corpus linguistic approaches can effectively facilitate such a retrieval. However, we must not forget that academic language is a social discourse, whether written or spoken. This means that academic discourse is neither unmuddied by issues of power and privilege nor divorced of cultural traditions. Such social parameters raise questions surrounding the ways in which questions are posed across languages as well as the apparent comparability of texts across languages; a perennial issue in contrastive linguistic research. In fact, arguably, comparing any language and domain of language use with English can be intrinsically problematic due to the sheer vastness of speakers and users of English as well as its global standing and international prestige. Therefore, if we are to draw any meaningful conclusions from a contrastive analysis of questions, this multilingual investigation requires conceptualisation and theorisation from the fields of academic discourse, discussed here in Chapters 1 and 2, as well as corpus-based contrastive linguistics, discussed in Chapter 3. While the overall conclusions I draw in Chapters 5, 6, and 7 argue that writers of economics research articles in each language make use of questions to engage their readers, albeit to varying degrees and in different ways, it is important that we first consider the conceptual and theoretical notions that have framed this research.
To this end, this chapter begins this consideration by presenting a thorough account of the multilingual and global academy being investigated, and interrogates and considers issues of comparability across languages th...
