Tracing convergence and divergence in pairs of Spanish and English research article abstracts : The case of Ibérica

This paper investigates patterns of rhetorical convergence and divergence in pairs of RA abstracts (English-Spanish and Spanish-English) published in the journal Ibérica. To that end, a total of 84 pairs of author-translated RA abstracts were analyzed. Based on the results of a pilot study, the following rhetorical patterns were analyzed in the corpus: text-referring expressions, degree of epistemic commitment, amplified attitude, self-mention, and periphrastic (e.g. multi-word) expressions. In addition, selected authorial input was requested to seek further explanations about the variation across these two languages. For text-referring expressions, broad cross-linguistic convergence was found in the expressions used and the degree to which the text is given agency. By contrast, the abstracts in Spanish were found to include greater degree of epistemic commitment, more amplified expressions of attitude, more self-mention, particularly in the plural first person, and periphrastic equivalents. Authorial input indicated that some of these diverging patterns were due to collocational differences but they were also influenced by beliefs about what is more natural in Spanish. Our results suggest that there may be specific lexical bundles performing intensifying functions in Spanish that deserve further investigation. These findings may have implications for ESP pedagogy and translation studies.