Figure of Other in Academic Discourse

The paper focuses on the semantic role of Other in academic discourse. Drawing on ideas expressed by M.M. Bakhtin and Yu.M. Lotman, the authors see Other as a key actor of written communication in the academic community and aim to describe the specifics of verbalizing Other’s presence in academic discourse as compared to fiction genres. The empirical basis of the study is constituted by a corpus of research papers written by Russian linguists and published over the period of 1991 through 2012 as part of the Logical Analysis of Language series edited by N.D. Arutyunova. In the initial stage of the research the corpus was used as a source of language data featuring contexts indicative of omnipresent Other. The second stage consisted in semantic analysis of language samples followed by cognitive interpretation and relied both on present-day linguistic theories and recent research in psychology. Results include a typology of Other in academic discourse and a description of relevant lexical and syntactic units systemically functioning as explicit and implicit markers of Other in Russian written academic communication. Addressing the figure of Other in academic discourse offers insights on the cognitive background of academic communication and brings to light key pragmatic intentions shaping interaction within the academic community

Academic community · Academic writing · Cognition · Discourse analysis · Discourse community · Genre analysis · Linguistics · Social science · Sociology · Typology · Computer Science · Discourse Analysis and Cultural Communication · Education, Literature, Philosophy Research · Language, Communication, and Linguistic Studies · Psychology