Knowledge construction in discussions of research articles in two disciplines in Spanish: The role of resources of appraisal.

Abstract In his study of "forms of discourse", Bernstein (1999) differentiates what he refers to as horizontal discourse (everyday, commonsense knowledge) and vertical discourse (uncommonsense knowledge). He further distinguishes in vertical discourse two distinct modalities: "hierarchical knowledge structures" and "horizontal knowledge structures". The first of these corresponds to what Maton (2014) calls "scientific culture", and the second to "humanistic culture". Bernstein proposes that knowledge in the sciences is constructed by the integration of meanings, while in social sciences and the humanities by the segmented accumulation of different "languages". In a tradition of dialogue between systemic functional linguistics and Bernstein's sociology of knowledge, and later with its further development in Legitimation Code Theory (Maton, 2014; Christie and Martin, 2007; Hood, 2010; Christie and Maton, 2011), this paper explores how the kind of knowledge structures underlying different disciplines is revealed in differences in specific discourse semantic features of comparable texts written in Spanish. The features explored in the texts of the corpus are options of the system of appraisal (Martin and White, 2005; Hood and Martin, 2005). This system provides resources to negotiate feelings, values and different voices in discourse. Analyses apply the tools of the discourse system of appraisal to explore the ways in which knowledge claims are negotiated in a set of eight discussion sections from research articles in two disciplines, Microbiology and Sociology. The findings reveal interesting disciplinary differences that haven't been explored before in the frame of the dialogue of the two theories mentioned above on texts in Spanish. These findings can inform programs of support for academic Spanish across disciplines. Highlights • Knowledge construction. • Systemic functional linguistics. • System of appraisal. • Discussion section of research articles. • Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]