Historical Academic Writing between local and transnational communities

In recent papers (Bondi 2007a, 2007b, 2009, Bondi/Silver 2004, Bondi/Mazzi 2008), introductions and conclusions of English and Italian historical research articles have been investigated taking into consideration the different textual voices therein involved. In this study, we continue this line of work by comparing their structure and their textual voices. These liminal spaces are conceived as the gateways that give historians an access to their colleagues’ works and show the rhetorical traditions of local disciplinary communities. Hence, they seem to be the ideal research objects for identifying cross-cultural variations and similarities. In fact, the transnational and national analogies and differences are thought to be useful for enhancing the disciplinary debate on the teaching of academic discourse across languages and cultures and the awareness of both the general and the peculiar features of RAs. In order to detect them, the methodological approach integrates the tools of genre studies and of corpus linguistics, thus combining a quantitative and qualitative analysis, in order to examine two sets of small comparable corpora of openings and conclusions derived from English and Italian RAs. The results reveal that the rhetorical structures of the openings and of the conclusions are similar in English and Italian RAs: openings start from a specific fact and move to general observations, partly following Swales’ CARS model, while conclusions are characterized by a move that can be defined “Recapitulation and synthesis”. Dissimilarities emerge when the textual voices are concerned: borrowing Bakthin’s terminology, English openings and conclusions are mainly “dialogic” whereas Italian openings and conclusions are essentially “monologic”. The epistemology of historical research articles is then similar but they have different forms of dialogism.