The Discussion section in Microbiology research articles: genre, engagement and knowledge construction

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to identify common patterns in texts that function as Discussion of research articles in the area of Microbiology. With this purpose, a corpus of four texts was analyzed manually from the perspective of genre in Systemic Functional Linguistics. The schematic structure of the texts and the resources realizing it as configuration of meanings in the three metafunctions of language were explored. The analysis showed that the Discussion of research articles in this area realizes the genre warranty of the research, whose purpose is to legitimate the results found in the research in order to persuade the readers and to guarantee that they are pertinent to be incorporated to the body of disciplinary knowledge. The discourse-semantic resources found as relevant in the texts were the co-articulation of projection, a resource of the appraisal system, and comparison, a resource of the conjunction system. Concede plus counter pairings were found only when the writer rejects possible objections of the readers. The resources found suggest that the new knowledge in Microbiology is integrated in a hierarchical structure of vertical knowledge. Due to the number of texts analyzed in this article, the results obtained are considered preliminary.