Rhetorical Pattern of Argumentation in the Research Article: A Corpus Approach

Academic writing is an argumentative entity carefully crafted to project specific desired knowledge claims. Writers engage in the use of particular rhetorical structure devices to advance arguments and negotiate knowledge in order to persuade and convince an academic audience. This corpus based study examined the rhetorical schemeta (e.g. definition, evaluation, centrality claim) often deployed by Nigerian academics in the cross disciplinary fields of language arts and natural science to advance arguments in research articles. The study aimed at identifying how academic writers project knowledge claims in the research article. Three key objectives underlying this study were to identify elements used in staking claims, determine the patterns such elements follow and their communicative functions. The data for the study were 20 comparable research articles derived from two academic sub-corpora (10 academic writing humanities and 10 academic writing natural sciences) of the International Corpus of English Nigeria (ICE). Analysis of the data was done using AntMover software analyser. The study revealed, for instance, that the academics frequently used specific types of rhetorical devices that varied in their schemes more than some other types. The study has implications for academic writing and reader comprehensibility.