“Representing Historians at Work in Italian and English: Reporting frameworks in Book Review Articles”

The study focuses on two small corpora of book review articles in history and looks at the lexicalization of discursive procedures in English and in Italian, keeping in mind the tension between narrative and argument that characterizes historical discourse. Cross-linguistic examination of how argument is represented in both corpora pays particular attention to the representation of the reviewed author’s discourse, while studying the values reflected and implied by the different lexical choices in context. Special attention is paid to collocation, lexico-grammatical patterns and semantic preference, following a recent upsurge of interest in corpus-based approaches to the phraseological features of academic discourse. The general questions addressed are: how do historians represent the activity of their community in terms of argument? Is the variety of lexical tools employed in one language peculiarly distinctive? Does it reflect different value systems?