“The discourse function of academic connectors in abstracts”

The paper provides a brief analysis of the ways in which contrastive markers signal the argumentative roles played by textual units in the structure of abstracts. The study focuses on a case study of "however" as a contrastive connector in historical abstracts. This admittedly limited point of view helps discuss the core meaning of contrastive expressions and their role in specific generic structures and discipline-specific argumentative procedures. Perhaps most importantly, the findings show the need to consider multiple dimensions of language variation in the analysis of discourse patterns and their markers. The interplay between text and context can be analysed with different degrees of delicacy, with reference to both discourse – defined as the general field of social activity in which the speech event takes place – and to genre – defined as the class of communicative events to which the specific set of communicative events examined belongs. The meta-argumentative dimension of contrastive connectors can be seen as constitutive in the definition of both academic discourse in general and academic abstracts in particular. In addition to that, the study shows the close link between language choice and epistemology in academic discourse, i.e. the way they represent their own activities and procedures as against major methodological debates. Finally, the study also contributes to showing the need for corpus-based analyses to complement more intensive studies of particular texts, and vice versa. Text and discourse studies can only be fully developed when closer analysis of particular instances of communicative events is integrated with quantitative data from wider textual bases. These provide the necessary background and support to textual interpretation.