Overview

DISCOWER is a discipline-oriented construction-based corpus of written English as a lingua franca:

1. academic disciplines are now modelled as complex and dynamic systems involving embodied cognitive processes (Bernini and Woods 2014) and relying on foreign languages for the transfer and implementation of (inter)disciplinary conceptual frames (OECD 2019);
2. English used in international academic communication is being reconceptualized (Hartse and Kubota 2014; Mauranen 2017) owing to the proliferation of journals from outside Anglophone countries (Flowerdew 2022) among Scopus- and Web of Science-indexed databases (Hyland 2015);
3. ELF, or English as a lingua franca, is seen as the official means of global academic communication (Cogo and Jenkins 2010) shared by users with different (socio)cognitive backgrounds who, nevertheless, “maintain a general awareness of belonging to the community” (Mauranen 2017: 12);
4. abstracts are “carriers of disciplinary epistemology” (Hyland 2004: 63), compressing strategic content into characteristic forms;
5. constructions are form-meaning pairings which are founded on embodied concepts, shaped through usage and collectively entrenched by members of a (disciplinary) community (e.g. authors, editors), whose performance is sampled in a corpus;
6. corpora can be researched through different modalities, e.g. auditory (VOICE, ELFA, ACE) and visual (WrELFA), and modes, e.g. spoken language and intonation.

What others have noted:

Studies on ELF have been produced which employ usage-based models (e.g. Seidlhofer 2004, 2011; Mauranen 2012; Gilner 2016; Ranta 2017), including those based on the notion of a construction (e.g. Pirc 2013; Yilmaz and Römer 2020; Yilmaz 2020). A cognitive level underlying ELF constructions has been recognized (see, for instance, Hall 2017), possibly in the form of embodied concepts (Pitzl 2018). The impact of the modalities and modes upon ELF constructions has been acknowledged and the contribution of different members of disciplinary communities towards ELF constructions has been recognized, with spoken and written corpora compiled to foster related research.

Still, constructions in ELF have not been explored beyond sentence level, which means that academic text types/genres, including written abstracts of research articles, have not yet been researched as (multi-mode) constructions (Bergs 2008; Hoffmann 2018), i.e. symbolic wholes integrating cognition and usage at linguistic and paralinguistic levels.

What we'd like to add:

The DISCOWER team intends to integrate existing observations and verify whether the relationship between abstracts and disciplines could allow us to delineate disciplines as form-meaning pairings, i.e. constructions. We identify Gestalt-based schematic concepts and operationalize them as attributes. We use these attributes to describe the  multi-mode ELF abstract: both basic (typically composed of the abstract text and its label) and elaborated (typically composed of the basic abstract and its context). We collect basic abstracts and elaborated abstracts in a corpus of 2136 exemplars. By comparing these exemplars in and across three academic disciplines, we attempt to establish the cognitive profiles of law, linguistics and literary studies.

What we'd like to accomplish:

1. to create a corpus of ELF abstracts in three strata and three academic disciplines;
2. to set the corpus within the framework of cognitive constructions;
3. to create catalogues of (linguistic and paralinguistic) constructions;
4. to research differences in the use of these constructions in law, linguistics and literary studies;
5. to create and disseminate a research procedure that could be extended to other disciplines in the field of humanities and social sciences.