[Intercultural perspectives on research writing]
ENThe growing importance of English in international academic communities has recently become one of the key issues in applied linguistics and discourse studies. The international role of English and the intercultural nature of most academic communities has emphasised the need for cross-cultural studies and in particular of cross-cultural rhetoric. Considered from this perspective, Pilar Mur-Dueñas and Jolanta Šinkūnienė’s edited volume on academic writing across cultures is a timely addition to the literature on Intercultural Rhetoric (IR). The volume not only continues the tradition of publications dedicated to various aspects of contrastive rhetoric, but also makes an original contribution to the field of intercultural studies by adopting IR approaches to the analysis of academic texts written in L2 English. The volume devotes particular attention to academic genres such as research articles, conference abstracts, PhD abstracts and research abstracts by writers of Czech, Lithuanian, Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese and Malaysian, with a focus on a wide variety of lexico-grammatical, discursive and rhetorical features, such as shell nouns, reformulation markers, the anticipatory it structure, personal pronouns, hedges, boosters, citations, evaluative acts and evaluative language.
