Issues with Publishing Abstracts in English: Challenges for Portuguese Linguists’ Authorial Voices

Joana Vieira Santos and Paulo Nunes Da Silva
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Joana Vieira Santos: CELGA-ILTEC, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Faculty of Arts, University of Coimbra, 3001-401 Coimbra, Portugal
Paulo Nunes Da Silva: CELGA-ILTEC, Department of Humanities, Universidade Aberta, 1269-001 Lisboa, Portugal

Publications, 2016, vol. 4, issue 2, 1-17

Abstract: This paper assesses the impact of publishing abstracts in English in the Portuguese Linguistics Association (APL) Proceedings from 2001 to 2010. The study was carried out with a corpus of 137 abstracts, follows a Text Linguistics model inspired by the Interactionnisme Sociodiscoursif and links text features to the social practices and genre repertoires of this community. Quantitative data show signs of a “Portuguese identity” in authors’ voices such as personal forms, move signaling, long sentences, profuse embedding, heavy subjects, and variations in content selection, but also signs of standard academic guideline-indexed choices in impersonal forms, template sentences, coordinated constituents, nominalizations, and conventional text plans. Standard genre models and writing features from “core” academic communities coexist with alternative and traditional ways of writing and of disseminating knowledge, which is typical of a semiperipheral non-native English-speaking community torn between conflicting language and cultural paradigms. These contrasting tendencies are linked to identity changes within the community, as APL authors try to achieve international recognition by publishing abstracts in English as a Foreign Language. Since the APL research topic is the Portuguese language, the process mirrors the authors’ struggle between standard internationalization in English and individual stance in Portuguese.

Keywords: publishing; English; Portuguese; abstract; genre; academic discourse (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A2 D83 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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