Academic and Professional Discourse Genres in Spanish

This volume offers a description and a deep examination of discourse genres across four disciplines (Psychology, Social Work, Industrial Chemistry, and Construction Engineering), in academic and professional settings. The study is based on one of the largest available corpus on disciplinary written discourse in Spanish (PUCV-2006 Corpus of Spanish containing almost 60 million words). Twelve chapters range from the theoretical guiding principles of the research in terms of genre conception, the detailed description of each corpus (academic and professional), computational analysis from multi-dimensional perspectives, and the qualitative analysis of two specialized genres (University Textbook and Disciplinary Text) in terms of their rhetorical macro-moves and moves. Theoretically speaking, a multi-dimensional perspective (social, linguistic and cognitive) is emphasized and special attention to the cognitive nature of discourse genres is supported.

Douglas Biber, Arizona State University:
Over the past 20 years, there has been an explosion of corpus-based studies of discourse. However, most of those studies have focused on the analysis of English-language corpora, and this is especially true of the studies that have been published in English. As a result, we currently know surprisingly little about the corpus-based study of linguistic variation in languages other than English. The present book takes a major step towards filling this gap in previous research, providing detailed corpus-based descriptions of genre variation in Spanish, one of the most widely-spoken languages of the world. The descriptions focus on written discourse in four major disciplines: psychology, social work, industrial chemistry, and construction engineering. However, unlike most previous studies, the research here further distinguishes between academic and professional discourse, and explicitly compares the linguistic patterns of use between the two domains.