Lithuanian academic discourse revisited: Features and patterns of scientific communication

Abstract

Abstract Over the past several decades, there has been an increasing interest in academic discourse investigations with a specific focus on disciplinary, cultural, and generic aspects of academic text construction. Studies of Spanish, Italian, Greek, Portuguese, French, German, and Russian (inter alia) academic discourse have revealed not only the universal features characteristic of many writing cultures, but also unique rhetorical features, typical of only some of them. In this article, we focus on academic discourse investigations in scientific texts written in one of the lesser-studied languages, Lithuanian. We review here studies of Lithuanian scientific discourse and what those studies reveal about the specific features of Lithuanian academic discourse. The first part of the article identifies how rhetorical structures differ between English and Lithuanian academic texts, whereas the second part presents a comprehensive overview of the functional groups of linguistic units, such as metadiscourse markers, stance and engagement markers, and conceptual metaphors, and how these are different or similar to English academic discourse. The overview of the empirical studies shows the current state of knowledge about Lithuanian academic discourse and highlights some of the items that distinguish Lithuanian writing. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of identifying academic writing traditions of other languages to acknowledge diversity.