The use of rhetorical moves and lexico-grammatical patterns in research articles written in Chilean Spanish. Its implications for the teaching of scientific writing/Uso de movidas retoricas y patrones lexico-gramaticales en articulos de investigacion en español. Implicancias para la enseñanza de la escritura cientifica

In this paper, we propose a new method for the description of rhetorical structures and their corresponding linguistic features in research articles in Spanish. The method is based on a critical review of different approaches focusing on this phenomenon. To this effect, we labelled a 162-research-article corpus using rhetorical moves. The corpus is representative of Chilean scientific production between 2000 and 2008. We applied statistical techniques to over the 11,000 records to account for the prototypical rhetorical moves and describe the lexico-grammatical patterns associated to them in this type of specialist texts. The results of the study demonstrate the operation of particular 'prototypical' rhetorical moves in such texts as well as the lexico-grammatical patterns which formalize the former. The research done provides valuable empirical evidence both for those aiming at the analysis of scientific discourse and those focusing on the teaching and learning of scientific writing.