Research Articles in Business and Marketing: A Comparative Analysis of English Discussions and Italian Conclusioni

In the wide field of genre analysis, a number of studies have been devoted to the examination of research articles (RAs), which are considered the central genre of knowledge production (Swales, 1990 and 2004; Bhatia, 1993). Most prominent has been work on the organizational patterns of RA sections such as Introduction and Discussion (Swales, 1990; Dudley-Evans, 1994; Holmes, 1997), and particular text features such as hedges and modality (Hyland, 1996 and 2005; Salager-Meyer, 1992). Nowadays the growing tendency to examine RAs from a cross-disciplinary perspective (Bamford and Bondi, 2005; Hyland and Bondi, 2006) has not been accompanied by a burgeoning interest in genre variation across languages. In an attempt to partially fill this gap, this study analyses the closing portions of a selection of business RAs written in English and Italian. Data for this investigation consist of two comparable corpora of Discussions and Conclusioni drawn from some of the articles published in six specialised journals in 2000 (Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly and Marketing Science; Economia e Management, Studi Organizzativi and Micro Macro Marketing). With the support of corpus linguistic tools such as wordlists, concordances and collocates, the paper sheds some light on the similarities and differences which characterize the two sets of texts in terms of some rhetorical, content and metadiscursive elements (Vande Kopple, 1985; Crismore et al. 1993; Hyland, 2005). On the assumption that metadiscourse plays a crucial role in directing the reader and showing him/her how to understand what is said by the author, considerable attention is paid to the metadiscursive elements which are deployed in English and in Italian to present research findings and convince the addressee of the truthfulness and trustworthiness of the results presented.