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Ethnic and Disciplinary Cultures and Understatement: Litotic Constructions in Polish and English Linguistics and Biology Research Articles

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Aspects of Culture in Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Learning

Part of the book series: Second Language Learning and Teaching ((SLLT))

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Abstract

Linguistic interest in culture-dependent differences in the rhetorical organisation of written texts can now boast a fifty year research tradition, which produced a large number of analyses of L2 student writing, scholarly texts and other professional discourse, thus contributing directly to the theory and practice of teaching English for Academic and Occupational Purposes and indirectly to internationalisation of scholarship. Against this rich tradition, the interest in disciplinary differences in academic communication may appear more modest, but also in this area well-marked and consistent rhetorical differences have been observed, in some cases the variation being so systematic as to justify the use of the label ‘disciplinary cultures’. This chapter combines the two perspectives and offers a cross-disciplinary cross-cultural perspective on understatement in English and Polish research articles representing two disciplines, linguistics and biology. The main focus of this chapter is on litotes and litotic structures, defined as the denial of the opposite, with the aim to study their frequency, type and function in one academic genre and in two languages and two disciplinary contexts. The analysis is based on two corpora of research articles, each comprising two hundred papers published in the years 2005–2007 in renowned Polish and international journals concerned with linguistics and biological sciences. A preliminary analysis of the data has already shown that litotic constructions are not rare in the corpora under analysis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Unless otherwise indicated, all examples in Sects. 15.1 and 15.2 are invented by the authors and meant only to illustrate the type of construction discussed.

  2. 2.

    From The Nature of Existence, vol. 2, by John McTaggart (1988 [1927]): 172), retrieved 16 May 2010 from http://books.google.pl/books?id=1m45AAAAIAAJ.

  3. 3.

    All counts are based on WordSmith 5.0 (Scott 2008).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland

    Andrzej Łyda & Krystyna Warchał

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  1. Andrzej Łyda
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  2. Krystyna Warchał
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Correspondence to Andrzej Łyda .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Language Acquisition, Institute of English, University of Silesia, Grota-Roweckiego 5, Sosnowiec, 41-205, Poland

    Janusz Arabski

  2. Institute of English, Department of Language Acquisition, University of Silesia, Grota-Roweckiego 5, Sosnowiec, 41-205, Poland

    Adam Wojtaszek

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Łyda, A., Warchał, K. (2011). Ethnic and Disciplinary Cultures and Understatement: Litotic Constructions in Polish and English Linguistics and Biology Research Articles. In: Arabski, J., Wojtaszek, A. (eds) Aspects of Culture in Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Learning. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20201-8_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20201-8_15

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