The Projection of Critical Attitude in Research Article Introductions by Anglo-American and Spanish Authors

Abstract

RA writers need to use evaluative language in their texts to highlight the newsworthiness and pre-eminence of their work. Research indicates that the way they use evaluation may depend on their own cultural norms and expectations. The present paper adopts a clause-level and functional perspective to investigate cross-cultural differences in the use of evaluative features in article introductions from RAs published internationally by Spanish and Anglosaxon authors. In order to map out and compute evaluative acts accurately a number of different aspects are examined, such as their position within the move structure, the entity evaluated or the type of value conveyed. The results reveal important differences in the way evaluation is used in the two corpora, which could be linked to the writers’ different cultural norms and expectations.