RHETORICAL STRUCTURE OF SERBIAN AND ENGLISH CALLS FOR PAPERS: THE CASE OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Abstract

Along with international research in the diverse field of genre analysis of academic discourse, there has been a steady increase in the number of studies of Serbian academic texts and comparative studies between Serbian and other languages. However, in the variety of researched academic genres, calls for papers (CFPs) have received comparatively little attention. In this study, the author compares the schematic structure of a sample of 16 Serbian and 16 English calls for papers of international conferences in humanities and social sciences in order to analyze differences in the production of rhetorical moves according to Swales’ (1990) CARS model and Yang’s (2013; 2015) models of rhetorical moves in CFPs. The results of qualitative and quantitative analyses show that Serbian CFPs in humanities and social sciences do contain a set of rhetorical moves which differs from the English calls in the ordering of the opening steps, the contents of the info-promotional Move 3 and the concluding moves, as English calls offered more follow-up websites and Serbian authors opted for a cordial greeting. The author concludes that the results reveal different practices in the two languages that may be culturally determined.