Rhetorical relations in English and Spanish research articles

Abstract

Research articles have been the object of study of many scholars within the ESP tradition, most notably, since Swales' (1990) studies on academic language. Such studies have focused mainly on ‘moves' and ‘steps', i.e. on the part-whole relations that comprise each of the sections in a research article. However, little is known about the iterative connectivity of sentences and paragraphs that make up the discourse organization of research articles sections. This study uses Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1987) for the analysis of discourse relations in introductions and conclusions of research articles from applied linguistics journals in two languages, English and Spanish. It also uses Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1985) in order to locate introductions and conclusions within a general theory of register. The results showed significant trends across registers and languages that can inform the teaching of writing within the context of academic expository texts.