academic discourse

The article analyzes linguistic means used for boosting which is considered a crucial metadiscourse strategy regularly employed in the genre of research article abstracts. The study aims at identifying the types of booster and the frequency of occurrence of boosting markers in Russian-language research article abstracts in the field of soft and hard sciences. The study makes an attempt to reveal differences in the use of these metadiscourse patterns and suggest reasons for the uneven distribution of boosters in the two corpora.

The article presents the results of the cross-disciplinary research which focuses on the two types of discourse markers – hedges and boosters and their use in Russian official dissertation reviews. The study is based on reviews of official opponents and external reviewers of PhD theses on linguistics, literary criticism, history, physics, chemistry and medicine. The reviews were borrowed from the online pages of dissertation councils of Russian universities.

Modern communication is greatly influenced by digital technologies which make available a new type of communication – hybrid oral-written communication, that is texts which contain both verbal and non-verbal components. This research is focused on a video article as a speech genre of academic communication, which appeared relatively recently on digital scientometric platforms. The article describes constitutive features of a video article, its discourse features, and its functional requirements.

The author of the article understands object clauses as a semantic type of sentences with a set of different ways of expressing semantics: polypredicative subordinate clauses, asyndetic clauses, monopredicative clauses, clauses with parenthesis. It is suggested that the set of constructions used in academic discourse depends on the genre of the academic text. The genres of article abstracts and thesis summaries as secondary texts (texts about texts) were chosen as a material for a comparative study.