Genre Variation in Academic Communication. Emerging Disciplinary Trends

This volume, the first of the Cerlis Series, investigates variation in scholarly communication from different analytical perspectives. Ranging from genre analysis to text linguistics, systemic functional grammar and multimodal approaches, its main purpose is that of providing insights into forms and modes of academic and scientific communication still little considered or as yet neglected in existing literature because of their relative novelty – due to changing practical and domain-related needs or cognitive expectations on the part of the audience – or their generic elusiveness – resulting from processes of multi-generic contaminations. On this basis, the volume discusses generic variation both in contrastive terms, by comparing and distinguishing contiguous genres, and, in analytical terms, by evidencing trends of variation and examining variation-sensitive elements in different textualizations of the same genre, and focusing especially on such variables as rhetorical strategy, writer stance, interpersonal engagement, and argumentation.