Introduction [Academic discourse, genre and small corpora]

The volume collects papers which focus on a number of features of academic discourse using tools offered by Corpus Linguistics. Academic discourse can be studied to see the ways in which the experts of a discipline construct their own activity in terms of a "conversation" within and around the scientific community. The tools of corpus analysis, especially with reference to small, specialized corpora, have greatly contributed to the study of language variation across genres and across disciplines both from a descriptive as well as from a didactic point of view