In this talk, I discuss an in-depth analysis of questions as reader engagement devices in economics research articles in English, French, and Spanish. Merging contrastive and corpus linguistic approaches, the study interrogates issues of comparability and establishes a base from which to draw meaningful comparisons between discourses within the global, multilingual academy. The corpus-based contrastive analysis approach is applied to the study of questions in the English and French economics subcorpora of KIAP (Fløttum et al. 2006), as well as a comparable Spanish subcorpus created for this study. Direct questions are identified through the use of a "?" and illocutionary force indicating devices are identified to extract indirect questions. In the analysis, each direct and indirect question that serves to allow the writer to interact with the reader is analysed in terms of the following equivalences: frequency, function, type and form, location, passivity, tense/aspect and verbal modality, and question sentence type. A second analysis is presented in terms of these same equivalences; however, the second analysis focuses on shared question function across languages. The findings of this study indicate key similarities and differences across languages and allow for engagement with wider conversations on academic language in the multilingual academy. In concluding this talk, the findings are considered in terms of their applicability to the teaching and learning of academic language as well as future directions in corpus-based contrastive linguistics.
References
Fløttum, K., Dahl, T., & Kinn, T. (2006). Academic voices: Across languages and disciplines (Vol. 148). John Benjamins Publishing.