Interpersonal Resources in Academic Discourse

Thanks to the recent developments in the theory of academic discourse analysis, it is now increasingly accepted that negotiation of academic knowledge is intimately related to the social practices of academic communities: persuasive power of academic texts is seen to be closely dependent on thoughtful manipulation of rhetorical conventions and interpersonal resources that members of the academic community find convincing. To underpin this social constructivist position and to reveal some of the ways this is achieved, this study analyzes a relatively wide spectrum of academic texts including 20 research articles, 20 handbook chapters, 20 scholarly textbook chapters, and 20 introductory textbook chapters in applied linguistics. Analysis of the texts revealed that the expression of interpersonal relationships is an important feature of academic writing.

Autorentext

Davud Kuhi, PhD in Applied Linguistics, is an assistant professor at Islamic Azad University, Maraghe, Iran. He has been teaching ESP and Discourse Analysis, and his main research interests include academic discourse and genre analysis.