Argumentation in academic discourse: the case of Nobel Prize lectures in economic sciences

Nobel Prize lectures in Economic Sciences are examined in this contribution as an example of highly specialized discourse, reflecting all the features of a genre relevant to a discourse community (Flowerdew 2015). A corpus has been built, including all the 29 lectures delivered by the winners over a time span of fifteen years (2001-2015); the written version of the lectures has been considered in order to identify patterns of argumentation (Hyland 2013, van Eemeren 2019). An integrated methodology has been adopted, combining a corpus and a discourse perspective. The results of the analysis have shown examples of lexical indexicality and underlined some discourse markers, be they causal, temporal, additive or hypothetical, frequently adopted to develop the topics. Discourse analysis has shown how argumentation is constructed across a variety of fields through the exposition of models, methods and theories, at a symptomatic, comparative and causal level (van Eemeren – Grootendorst 1992). Particularly, comparative and causal features of the language have been illustrated with reference to “expectation”, which is the most prominent domain in this context. Moreover, some rhetorical strategies have been presented, such as the use of questions, narrative and figurative language, which characterize the relationship between the Lecturer and the audience.