Abstract
The issue of disciplinarity is becoming increasingly salient in discourse studies. Questions of how differences in the structures of intellectual fields and curricula help shape educational experiences and outcomes are the focus of studies across a variety of disciplines using a range of approaches. One way to access the specialized written genres employed by academia is to begin from the tenet that all materials read by students during their university training reveal relevant data about disciplinary genres. This article presents research that focuses on the collection, construction, and description of an academic corpus based on texts collected in four disciplinary domains of knowledge: Industrial Chemistry, Construction Engineering, Social Work, and Psychology. A review of the concepts of genre and academic discourse is presented. This is followed by a description of the procedures of collecting and organizing the Academic Corpus PUCV-2006, which comprises almost 60 million words. In addition, a preliminary genre typology of the 491 text corpus is provided.
Highlights
Empirical research from several linguistic approaches has documented the relevance of analysis based on corpus as a way of describing linguistic and discourse variations through the disciplines and through prototypical genres (Biber, 1988, 1994, 2005, 2006; Biber, Connor & Upton, 2007; Martin & Veel, 1998; Wignell, 1998; Williams, 1998; Swales, 1990, 2004; Flowerdew, 2002; Parodi 2005, 2006a, b, 2007a, b)
Some expected cross-discipline similarities are detected, but most interesting are the inter-disciplinary variations, where, for example, Industrial Chemistry and Psychology are at the extreme poles of the continuum
More disseminating-reader-oriented genres were found in the fields of Basic Sciences and Engineering, with a particular high frequency of Didactic Guideline and Textbook
Summary
Empirical research from several linguistic approaches has documented the relevance of analysis based on corpus as a way of describing linguistic and discourse variations through the disciplines and through prototypical genres (Biber, 1988, 1994, 2005, 2006; Biber, Connor & Upton, 2007; Martin & Veel, 1998; Wignell, 1998; Williams, 1998; Swales, 1990, 2004; Flowerdew, 2002; Parodi 2005, 2006a, b, 2007a, b). This article describes a research project currently being carried out at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile This project involves the collection, construction, and description of a corpus of written texts belonging to four disciplinary knowledge domains: Social Work, Psychology, Construction Engineering, and Industrial Chemistry.
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