The Linguistics of Academic Worth. Credit-giving and Evaluation in Written Academic Discourse

This book seeks to expand our understanding of academic worth by looking at how personal integrity (Part I) and scientific value judgements (Part II) are negotiated in research articles. Different disciplines and languages are targeted to illustrate how academics give credit to peers and evaluate their output in ways which are both sociorhetorically and epistemically congruent. On the basis of recent scholarship in the field of English academic discourse, it analyses such realisations in two subcorpora of research article texts. Chapter 1 describes how scholars co-construct their identities within disciplinary communities, while Chapter 2 looks at the range of credit-giving options available in written genres (most notably, authorship, citation and acknowledgement) and Chapter 3 offers a textual analysis of research article acknowledgements, whose communicative purpose is largely credit-oriented. The different theoretical approaches to evaluative language are compared in Chapter 4, while Chapter 5 discusses their specific realisations in academic texts and Chapter 6 analyses the use of evaluation in research article Discussions. The Conclusions attempt to bring together such insights, signalling their theoretical implications and possible directions for further research.