A novel multi-dimensional analysis of reply, response and rejoinder articles: When discipline meets time

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to profile the genre of reply, response, and rejoinder articles (3R) on a corpus of 480 texts sourced from the disciplines of History, Linguistics, Biology, Psychology, Chemistry, Physics, Politics, and Economics. A novel multi-dimensional model based on 124 linguistic features was developed on five functional dimensions: i. Literate vs. oral production, ii. Non-technical stance vs. specialized informational density, iii. Ethos-oriented non-narrative vs. logos-oriented narrative concerns, iv. Elaborated persuasion, and v. Overt expression of evaluation. The findings concerning disciplinary and diachronic variations across dimensions suggest: i. provided that 3R articles are heavily stance-loaded, relatively informative, and eloquently persuasive forms of academic discourse in nature, the genre of 3R in soft disciplines is literal, non-technical attitudinal, ethos-oriented non-narrative, elaborately persuasive and overtly evaluative, whereas it is oral, specialized information-dense narrative, logos-oriented persuasive and evaluative in hard disciplines; ii. the dimensions of evaluation, informativeness, and persuasiveness are the functional constants of the 3R genre across disciplines and time, despite significant discrepancies detected in the functional representation of oral/literate style and elaborated persuasion. These findings are relevant to the study of disciplinary rhetoric and may contribute to advanced genre pedagogy in EAP, ESP and EPP studies.