‘Glocal’ Rhetorical Practices in Academic Writing

Abstract

This article examines the rhetorical effects of a wide typological spectrum of epistemic modality markers in a contrastive English–Spanish corpus. The article seeks to provide evidence of the way non-native English scholars adopt standard Anglophone strategies for modelling persuasion while at the same time transferring some rhetorical practices of their national language into their L2 English texts. This gives rise to a hybrid modelling of persuasion. In discussing the hybrid (‘glocal’) nature of ‘alternative academic written Englishes’, this article also considers the feasibility of codifying these academic Englishes variants for effective transnational communication. Further, it is argued that academic writing pedagogy should provide exposure to the standard Anglophone norms as well as to its culture-determined variants, since the discoursal heterogeneity of those variants represents alternative spaces of linguistic and cultural production in contemporary research writing.