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The Linguistic Representation of Rhetorical Function

A Study of How Economists Present Their Knowledge Claims

Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Bergen

This article deals with how economists present their new knowledge claim in the genre of the research article. In the discipline of economics today, the claim is typically included not only in the obvious results/discussion section(s) but also in three other locations of the article: the abstract, the introduction, and the conclusion. The present study considers whether the rhetorical function of each of these three text parts has an impact on the linguistic realization of the claim. The corpus consists of 25 articles from two international journals, European Economic Review and Journal of International Economics. The investigation shows that economist authors commonly draw their readers’ attention to the claim by means of signaling expressions such as Our main finding is that . . . , not only in the introduction but also in the conclusion. The simple present seems to be the preferred tense in the claim sentence, even in the conclusion (We find . . . /We argue . . .). The discussion of these findings includes the views of discipline insiders, providing clear indications of the strategic nature of the research communication process.

Key Words: research article • knowledge construction • promotion of claims • discourse community • rhetoric of economics

This version was published on October 1, 2009

Written Communication, Vol. 26, No. 4, 370-391 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0741088309341241


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