The Effects of Globalisation of Science on Polish Academic Discourse: Tracing a Rhetorical Change

Abstract

The spread of English as the global language of academic communication has been found to affect academic communication in many national languages. This study reports on a change in the rhetorical structure of introductions to Polish-language journal articles that can be attributed to the growing exposure to English discourse patterns. On the basis of data drawn from a corpus of 150 introductions to linguistics articles published across 30 years, it examines the rhetorical organisation of Polish texts, showing that they assume features so far considered characteristic of English-language introductions and largely absent from academic Polish. The analysis shows in particular that the majority of Polish linguistics articles are now divided into sections, that the statement of research goals has become a stable rhetorical move in Polish introductions, and that its direct and cyclical realisations are becoming increasingly popular. These features make the structure of Polish article introductions less culturally distinctive and more similar to that of English-language texts.