Inspirations

While the DISCOWER project adopts a cognitive perspective (see Foundations for details), it remains inspired by a functional approach. Taking the cognitive and the functional as complementary (Hart 2016, 2017), i.e. as “brothers in arms” (Nuyts 2005) working towards a synergy which can be seen both as an invitation to functional linguists “not yet familiar with the tenets and analytic tools that cognitive linguistics has to offer to find out more about them and as an invitation to cognitive linguists to look beyond the traditional rank levels of linguistic structure” into the layers of social structures, interactions, values and beliefs (Hart 2024: 4), we find two areas of functional research particularly stimulating:

examinations of abstracts of research articles (e.g. Bhatia 1993; Bondi 2001; Cavalieri 2020; Dahl 2004; Darabad 2016; Doró 2013; Florek and Hendges 2023; Hyland 2000, 2005, 2008; Lorés–Sanz 2009; Martín–Martín 2005; Pho 2008; Sancho–Guinda 2021; Swales and Feak 2009; Swales 2014), as well as related genres (e.g. Akbaş and Farnia 2021; Biber et al. 2007; Breeze 2016), including those “modified” by ELF users (Lorés–Sanz 2016; Mauranen 2021);
studies in English as a lingua franca (e.g. Cogo 2012; Ranta 2017; Mauranen 2017; Seidlhofer 2011; Seidlhofer et al. 2017), including corpus-based analyses of research writing (Murillo 2018; Rowley-Jolivet 2017; Wu et al. 2020), particularly those employing constructionist and/or cognitive perspectives (e.g. Hall 2017; Pitzl 2018; Vetchinnikova 2017; Yilmaz 2020; Yilmaz and Römer 2020).

Within the two areas, we note the following shifts in conceptualizing abstracts of research articles:

from abstracts composed by authors of research articles to abstracts co-created by, e.g., editors and graphic designers,
from verbal abstracts to abstracts (co-)constituted by visual and aural resources, such as graphical and video abstracts,
from stand-alone abstracts to abstracts co-occurring with other genres,
from abstracts composed of traditional moves to abstracts co-composed of “out-of the box” elements.

Finally, we underlay these four shifts with the cognitive stratum, i.e. while our understanding of abstracts of research articles is scaffolded by the functionalist framework, it is based in theories of embodied cognition (see Foundations for details). Still, the three text type constructions illustrated in the DISCOWER corpus, i.e. the abstract text, the basic abstract and the elaborated abstract, can be researched as co-created by members of disciplinary communities, co-constituted by linguistic and paralinguistic modes, co-occurring within a context and co-composed of conventional and unconventional elements, which, we believe, provides further evidence to the “brotherhood” between functional and cognitive linguistics.