Academic discourse in Portugal: A whole different ballgame?

Abstract

Despite the existence of many contrastive studies that have drawn attention to academic discourse practices in other cultures, the formal constitution of the discipline known as Contrastive Rhetoric may ultimately have served to reinforce the hegemony of English Academic Discourse (EAD). That is to say, by focusing upon the technical question of how to reduce L1 interference in learners' English texts, teachers and researchers are actively discouraged from considering the broader ideological issue of how knowledge is construed elsewhere. Yet other ‘academic discourses’ do exist, sometimes so different from EAD in their structure and epistemological framework that they are scarcely recognisable as such to English-speaking practitioners. This paper presents the results of a survey of academic discourse in Portugal, in which a Corpus of 1,333,890 words (408 academic texts of different genres and disciplines) was analysed for the presence of particular discourse features not usually found in EAD. Results suggest that, in addition to a ‘modern’ style calqued upon the hegemonic discourse, there are also at least two other academic discourses regularly produced in Portugal today that are based upon an entirely different epistemology to the rational empirical paradigm underlying EAD.