Evidence from an Academic Corpus of Spanish in Four Disciplines

introduction1 The past decades have witnessed a remarkable surge of attention to the research of language variation through the study of the texts employed in different scientific disciplines. This focus on diversity has begun to describe and explain the divergent construction of specialized knowledge within discourse communities. At the same time, there is a lack of research and available data, based on corpus linguistics principles, to fill the gap that exists between a general approach and a more specific one based on naturally occurring language use. This specific approach should be one that is situated, data-driven, dynamic, and pedagogical (Herrington & Moran, 2005; Thaiss & Zawacki, 2006; Beaufort, 2007; Bazerman, 2008). Empirical research from diverse linguistic approaches has documented the relevance of analysis based on corpus as a way of describing linguistic and discourse variations in greater detail through the disciplines and through prototypical genres (Biber, 1988, 1994, 2005, 2006; Biber, Connor, & Upton, 2007; Martin & Veel, 1998; Wignell, 1998; Williams, 1998; Swales, 1990, 2004; Flowerdew, 2002; Parodi 2005, 2006, 2007a, 2007b). Based on these assumptions, this chapter describes a research project currently being carried out at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. This project involves the collection, construction, and description of a corpus of written texts belonging to four disciplinary knowledge domains: Social Work, Psychology, Construction Engineering, and Industrial Chemistry. The first part of this chapter presents some theoretical background that frames the research. The second part establishes the parameters of the constitution of the academic corpus, and undertakes a general description of the nine genres that have been identified in these four disciplinary domains during the five-year university programs of study.