Phraseology in Specialised Language: A Contrastive Analysis of Mitigation in Academic Papers

Abstract

The hypothesis of this paper is that writers with different academic backgrounds employ different mitigation devices and use phraseological units in a particular way in English research papers. The main objective of this study is therefore to analyse whether mitigation devices are used with different frequencies in the specific fields of engineering, medicine and linguistics. The corpus of this study consisted of academic papers published in international research journals devoted to these three disciplines. Mitigation devices were then detected and analysed in context with METOOL, a tool designed to identify metadiscoursal devices (research project reference FFI2016-77941-P). The data obtained revealed that there were in fact differences in the use of the phraseological units associated to mitigation devices by writers that belong to different specific fields, even though in theory they share the same genre and academic style.