Abstract
The hypothesis of this paper is that writers with similar academic backgrounds express personal attitudes in English and in Spanish differently in research papers. Thus, the main objectives are, first, to study the differences in the use of attitude devices in Spanish and English academic discourse; second, to compare the results in the different sections of articles; and finally to study the positive or negative semantic implications of the lexical items by carrying out a sentiment analysis. To this end, fifteen Spanish industrial engineering papers were compared with fifteen English industrial engineering papers. The results showed that there are in fact differences in the way academic writers communicate attitude, but the sentiment analysis revealed that neutral lexical items were the most commonly used in engineering research papers. Even though engineering researchers share the knowledge of the specialist content and the academic style of expressing their thoughts, personal attitudes were expressed in different ways in Spanish and in English.
About the author
Maria Luisa Cairió-Pastor is a professor of English language at the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain. She is the head of the Department She has published internationally in linguistic journals and volumes; her research areas are contrastive linguistics and the study of academic and professional discourse both for second language acquisition and for discourse analysis. She is in charge of the project "Identification and Analysis of Metadiscourse Strategies in Research Articles in English and Spanish", funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy (Reference FFI2016-77941-P).
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