Chapter 10. The Disciplinary Text genre as a means for accessing disciplinary knowledge

This chapter describes and illustrates the Disciplinary Text, an academic genre that has emerged as one of the most frequent means of written communication in the PUCV-2006 Academic Corpus of Spanish, in three different disciplinary domains (Social Work, Psychology, and Construction Engineering). In order to do so, we carried out an ascendant/descendent analysis of the rhetorical organisation of 270 texts. The results revealed the communicative purpose of the genre, as well as its particular rhetorical organisation, which is realized by three rhetorical macro-moves, eight moves and eighteen steps. Besides, quantitative results showed relevant variation between Social Sciences and Humanities and Basic Sciences and Engineering in terms of the rhetorical steps and moves that realize the communicative purpose of the genre. These results allow us to say that, although the main characteristics of the genre under study are the same across disciplines, some others are affected by disciplinary variation. One of the main implications of this analysis is the empirical evidence that the ways of negotiating knowledge through discourse varies depending on the discipline and knowledge domain.