Contrastive rhetoric and ESP: metatext in Spanish-English medical texts

Abstract

In 1966, Kaplan's article "Cultural Thought Patterns in Intercultural Education" laid the groundwork for what has become known as Contrastive Rhetoric (CR), a branch of linguistic study that points out the nature of linguistic differences among cultures, using discourse structures as the basis for research. Since Kaplan's article, several studies have focused on the analysis of the rhetorical differences between texts produced by writers with different cultural backgrounds. The research presented in this paper tries to explore the cultural differences between texts written in English by Spanish-speaking academics (non-native speakers) and by Anglo-American academics (native-speakers) with respect to the concept of metatext in research articles taken from medical journals. Our study is based on some previously published articles which compared English with other languages (Clyne 1987; Mauranen 1993; Valero Garcés 1996). The findings suggest that Spanish academics use less metatext than English writers, showing a greater tendency to implicitness in their writing.