Rosa Lorés

Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain

Knowledge-sharing and knowledge-telling: signalling nouns in academic discourse

In academic discourse a process of ‘intra-translation’ takes place between written and spoken language when experts in a certain discipline need to communicate knowledge to novices. Whereas in the process of ‘knowledge-sharing’ which takes place, among other ways, by means of the research article, experts present findings to their peers, in tertiary education the expert/teacher faces a process of ‘knowledge-telling’, which involves making information accessible to students/novices in the discipline. In the present paper, a small scale corpus study will be carried out in two academic subgenres. The study explores the cohesive mechanisms that the expert uses to facilitate the process of comprehension. The two subgenres analysed are the written subgenre of the research article and the spoken subgenre of the university lecture, in both cases in the field of biology and health sciences. The contrastive analysis will focus on the exploration, from a linguistic and discursive point of view, of a class of abstract nouns which we will be here called ‘signalling nouns’, following Flowerdew (2003), as lexicogrammatical resources (i) to signpost and signal information, and/or (ii) to manage the information flow and contribute to the construction of argument. Implications will then be drawn in an attempt to interpret the findings in the light of an inclusive explanatory mode, one which accounts for them in linguistic, discursive and sociological terms