Ethnic and Disciplinary Cultures and Understatement: Litotic Constructions in Polish and English Linguistics and Biology Research Articles

Abstract

Linguistic interest in culture-dependent differences in the rhetorical organisation of written texts can now boast a fifty year research tradition, which produced a large number of analyses of L2 student writing, scholarly texts and other professional discourse, thus contributing directly to the theory and practice of teaching English for Academic and Occupational Purposes and indirectly to internationalisation of scholarship. Against this rich tradition, the interest in disciplinary differences in academic communication may appear more modest, but also in this area well-marked and consistent rhetorical differences have been observed, in some cases the variation being so systematic as to justify the use of the label ‘disciplinary cultures’. This chapter combines the two perspectives and offers a cross-disciplinary cross-cultural perspective on understatement in English and Polish research articles representing two disciplines, linguistics and biology. The main focus of this chapter is on litotes and litotic structures, defined as the denial of the opposite, with the aim to study their frequency, type and function in one academic genre and in two languages and two disciplinary contexts. The analysis is based on two corpora of research articles, each comprising two hundred papers published in the years 2005–2007 in renowned Polish and international journals concerned with linguistics and biological sciences. A preliminary analysis of the data has already shown that litotic constructions are not rare in the corpora under analysis.