Evaluative Meanings and Disciplinary Values - eTheses Repository ...

genre has come increasingly under the spotlight over time, as the main channel of scientific
or scholarly communication in every academic discipline (Holmes, 1997, p. 322). At the
same time, RAs are increasingly being seen as one of the principal means by which discourse
communities are produced and sustained:
the writers of RAs need to manifest deference to and solidarity with their
respective research communities, which, through their various gatekeeping roles,
exert considerable power and influence (Swales, 2004, p. 218)
As Swales (2004, p. 240) points out, the unfinished business in current research on the RA
genre is the concept of disciplinary variation, and a particular corpus of RAs allows us to
examine the disciplinary proclivities in linguistic and stylistic features. By accumulating the
knowledge together with other members in the same discourse communities, a mere note on a
particular research topic is thus finally expanded into an RA that is finely attuned to
disciplinary conventions. For this reason, this genre is ideally suited to the investigation of
disciplinary differences.
Since the RA is the key genre in academic discourse, it is not surprising that it has
already been the subject of a great deal of research in the field of ESP. For instance, Thetela
(1997), which is in many respects similar to the current study, studies how evaluation works
through a text in order to transmit the writers purpose in four disciplines (i.e. history,
economics, psychology, and applied linguistics). Kuo (1999) quantitatively investigated
personal pronouns in a corpus of scientific RAs of three disciplines (i.e. computer science,
electronic engineering, and physics). Varttala (1999) investigated hedging in popular
scientific publications and specialist RAs on medicine. Hyland (2001) examines the strategy
of self-mention (i.e. the use of self-citation and exclusive first person pronouns) in a corpus of
240 RAs in eight disciplines (i.e. physics, marketing, biology, philosophy, applied linguistics,
sociology, electronic engineering, and mechanical engineering) in order to reveal how
self-mention is used and perceived as a way of understanding more about writing in the
disciplines and the kinds of options available to students (p. 208). Martinez (2001) reports on
the way in which impersonal constructions encoded in transitivity structures are used in a
corpus of 21 experimental RAs in the fields of physical, biological and social sciences. Other
notable studies on this genre focus on features such as evaluation and stance (e.g. Groom,
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