Patrones funcionales valorativos en informes de arbitraje de artículos de investigación

Abstract

Our research aims to identify the functional-appraisal patterns within a corpus of referee reports, a key genre in the production of scientific knowledge. For this, we first identified the most frequent functional elements or communicative purposes (Sabaj, Toro & Fuentes, 2011; Fuentes, 2018) and then described them according to some categories of the Appraisal model (Martin & White, 2005). Our intended sample was composed of 42 referee reports from Onomazein, the journal of linguistics and translation of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. Some of the results show that the most frequent communicative purposes are “Describe a problem”, “Highlight a positive aspect”, “Request an action” and “Suggest an action”. The high frequency of “Describe a problem” and “Highlight a positive aspect” were expected in this type of evaluative genre. Both purposes tend to focus on content issues and present a strong monoglossic stance which is intensified with Graduation meanings. The monoglossic pattern may be due to the position of power in which the referee is when evaluating an article. The high frequency of the communicative purposes “Request action” and “Suggest action” accounts for the negotiating function of this genre. Finally, when requesting and suggesting an action, attitude meanings refer to elements of form instead of content.