Teaching effective academic writing: If-conditionals in economics research articles

This contribution looks into knowlegde construction in research articles (RAs) in economics. Based on insights from insiders (for one, Brandis 1968) and discourse analytical investigation carried out manually by Merlini Barbaresi (1983), we proceed on the assumption that knoweldge construction results from the complex interplay of the macro-speech-acts (in the sense of Searle and Vandervecken 1985) of hypothesis, analysis/intepretation/generalization and prediction, where hypothesis and analysis/interpreation/generalization are functional to prediction. Using the tools of corpus linguistics (Scott 1997/2010), we provide grounded insights into this central claim (Cacchiani 2011). We then concentrate on the grammar of if-conditionals as a key cohesive device in the text, briefly touching uppon issues of grammatical form and meaning (in the sense of Purpura 1996).