Abstract
Hedging and boosting are significant communicative resources to construe and attain persuasion in different fields and particular genres of academic writing. They are both two sides of the same coin in the sense that they both contribute to the persuasive import of academic communication. Although boosting is a much less researched phenomenon than hedging, it is a key aspect of rhetorical persuasion in academic writing. This paper is devoted to the analysis of the use of boosters in a corpus of articles from three different disciplines (Marketing, Biology and Mechanical Engineering), and in this sense it is complementary to our previous article (Vázquez and Giner, 2008) in which we explored the use of epistemic markers used as hedges in the same corpus of RAs. Based on computer readable data, and combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the article argues that boosting deserves particular attention if we want to fully interpret the phenomenon of academic persuasion.
Highlights
Academic writing is normally based on empirical research, which is reported to the scientific community objectively, but with sufficient conviction
In this paper we focus on the analysis of research articles ( RAs) randomly selected from different disciplines (Marketing, Biology and Mechanical Engineering)
Academic writing has the main purpose of spreading new knowledge and discussing old
Summary
Academic writing is normally based on empirical research, which is reported to the scientific community objectively, but with sufficient conviction. The interpersonal contribution to this strategy involves the creation of the writer as a persona that is a presentation of the writer himself in the text to place new scientific work into the existing body of research and to create a Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses consensus between new research and potentially dissenting ideas. This can be achieved, for example, through the use of modality, first person pronouns and attribution (Myers, 1990). Other authors have widely discussed the persuasive function of metadiscourse (Mauranen, 1993; Hyland, 1998 and 2005: 63-71; Dafouz, 2003 and 2007) and some studies have been carried out to analyse how metadiscourse markers attain persuasion and how such persuasion is metadiscursively articulated (Dafouz, 2007)
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