Disciplines and discourses: social interactions in the construction of knowledge

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Abstract

The view that academic writing is persuasive is now widely accepted. Exactly how this is achieved, however, is more contentious, and raises a number of important issues, not least of which are those concerning the relationship between reality and accounts of it, the efficacy of logical induction, and the role of social communities in constructing knowledge. These topics have been debated for years in epistemology and the sociology of science, and in the past decade applied linguists have also entered the fray. Corpus linguists have been particularly active in emphasising the importance of rhetoric in academic persuasion, and, in this chapter, I bring my own small contribution to the discussion. In particular, I look at what differences in disciplinary discourses tell us about the ways academic knowledge is socially constructed, focusing on interpersonal features of language. I am interested in what this tells us about writers’ ideas of appropriate writer-reader relationships and how this, in turn, contributes to knowledge-making in the disciplines (Hyland & Bondi, 2006).

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