Metaargumentative expressions across genres: representing academic discourse

The study is based on the analysis of three small corpora, which weredesigned to compare economics textbooks, economics abstracts andhistorical abstracts. The analysis focuses on meta-argumentativeillocution markers, i.e. those referenes to discourse procedures thatsignal an argumwntative element in discourse. The study highlights thedifferent representations of disciplinary argument offered bydifferent genres and different disciplines. syntactic foregrounding ofargumentative procedures, for example, is shown to be part of theabstract's textual structures, whereas in textbooks it is mostlyattributable to the ideatrional dimension of introductory chapters.Meta-argumentative expressions also highlight different textualpatterns in the structure of economic and historical abstracts. Thestudy includes an analysis of selected lexical items, which arestudied from the combined point of view of corpus and text analysis.