LSPPC6 2021: (2/4) Daniel Pascual uncovers research projects’ pragmatic strategies to present their Partners
The pragmatic analysis unveiled a wide range of strategies within three main communicative functions (informational, promotional and interactional) in the Partners sections of the EUROPROwebs digital corpus. These strategies were conceptualised and discussed to comprehend how research projects introduce the institutions and members that make up the consortium of human agents involved in the international investigation. The relevance of strategies to disclose personal and professional details about the researchers were highlighted, as well as the saliency of strategies addressing the distinguishable roles that partners play in the respective projects and the reasons behind those decisions. Patterns of pragmatic strategies were also offered to explore how these sections are constructed out of the combination of pragmatic forces and from the perspective of researchers’ intentions.
Take a look at the abstract he proposed for the thematic panel:
This Is Us: Pragmatic Strategies to Disclose Research Partners in International Project Websites
International research groups aiming at producing new scientific knowledge are expected to communicate their project outcomes. Among the growing digital repertoire of genres and media to do so, research project websites stand out, conceived as both repositories to share the project development and tools to foster public engagement and open science to society (Lorés, 2020). Accordingly, regular project updates are offered to disseminate research results and enhance global visibility and scholarly credibility. One of their prominent sections is that of partners, which highlights the members in the project consortium, whether institutions or researchers, and provides details about their role and value in the investigation undertaken.From a pragmatic perspective, this paper seeks to analyse the strategies used by research groups to disclose the partners of their consortiums in the EUROPRO corpus, assuming that pragmatic patterns are more significantly identified in context-specific, smaller corpora. A total of 24 H2020 research project websites were found to include web-generated texts in their partners sections, thus making the database used in this analysis. Pragmatic strategies were manually coded in the corpus departing from a self-designed, data-driven taxonomy of 30 pragmatic strategies divided into three macrocategories (communicative, promotional, and interactional). Findings exhibit the saliency and overlapping of two particular pragmatic strategies in partners’ descriptions: disclosing factual information about project members (communicative) and highlighting members’ contribution to the project (promotional). Regarding the interactional metafunction, salient strategies comprise offering contact information about partners or praising other researchers. Overall, delving into the frequency and use of pragmatic strategies in research project partners sections may help identify meaningful textual mechanisms to showcase the research consortium and raise researchers’ visibility online.
Reference:
Lorés, R. 2020. Science on the web: The exploration of research websites of energy-related projects as digital genres for the promotion of values. Discourse, Context and Media 35, 1-10.