Arguing in economics and business discourse: phraseological tools in research articles

The paper looks at the representation of argument in the discourse of business and economics through the meta-argumentative phraseological elements that characterize research articles. The research article represents the most distinguished channel of knowledge dissemination within the community and plays a crucial role in the process of knowledge construction by providing a forum in which academics can set out their views in the form of arguments. Keeping in mind the basically dialogic and argumentative nature of academic discourse, the paper looks at the variety of phraseological tools employed by scholars in the field of business and economics in order to represent their own argument. Exploring the role of reflexive language in business and economics research articles can also be seen to contribute to an exploration of the discipline specificity of “general academic language” (Hyland and Bondi 2006). Disciplines are often characterized by their argumentative strategies as well as by their content, and phraseology can be a helpful signpost to discourse organization (Sinclair and Mauranen 2006). Even closely related areas like economics and business studies can be shown to reflect different epistemologies and different rhetorical preferences. The analysis is based on two comparable corpora of journal articles of about 2.5 million words. The methodology adopted ranges from comparison of frequency data to contextual analysis of phraseological units. Focusing on the extended unit of meaning (Sinclair 1996), phraseology is identified on the basis of a combination of frequency-based information and semantics. Drawing in particular on studies of an EAP-specific phraseology, the paper looks at both quantitative and qualitative factors in order to identify the data. Quantitative analysis of repeated strings of words is seen as an excellent starting point, but this needs to be related to significant functions, such as for example discourse relations. Mere lexical repetition, furthermore, does not account for repeated patterns involving a range of semantically related lexical items, as shown in Groom (2005) and Charles (2006). The focus here is on organizational discourse units (Sinclair and Mauranen 2006) and meta-argumentative phraseology in particular. look at phraseology as a signpost to discourse organization, i.e. “elements which organize unfolding discourse”, whether addressed at interpreting the interactive moves at play or signaling textual coherence and cohesion (Sinclair and Mauranen 2006: 70). The analysis offers an overview of variation in phraseology across business and economics, while focusing on one of the most typical phraseological items of the two corpora: "on the other hand". The discussion of the data focuses on disciplines and their variety of languages