response articles: micro and macro analysis

the present study reports an analysis of response articles in four different disciplines in the social sciences, i.e., linguistics, english for specific purposes (esp), accounting, and psychology. the study has three phases: micro analysis, macro analysis, and e-mail interview. the results of the micro analysis indicate that a three-level linguistic pattern is used by the writers in order to criticize others’ ideas. these levels are: the morphological, the syntactic, and the discoursal level. each level includes some sublevels: the morphological level: words, phrases, and metaphors, the syntactic level: questions, conditional clauses, and connectors, the discoursal level: audience recruit and discourse community recruit. each of these sublevels also has its own subcategories. the macro analysis of the texts, using swales’ [swales, j. (1990). genre analysis. english in academic and research settings. cambridge: cambridge university press], indicates that nine moves can be realized in the response articles. six moves are common to all of the articles in the corpus, and, thus, are called obligatory: ‘referring to the writer and her/his article’, ‘expressing disagreement or criticism’, ‘stating reasons for disagreement’, ‘supporting disagreement and criticism’, ‘making conclusion’ and ‘proposing a theory, claim, etc.’. the other three moves are optional; they are not seen in all response articles. these moves are: ‘acknowledgement’, ‘determining the domain and subject’, and ‘expressing admiration, approval or agreement’. two of the moves are accomplished by more than one strategy: the move ‘expressing disagreement or criticism’: ‘asking questions’, ‘using conditional clauses’, and ‘direct disagreement’, and the move ‘supporting disagreement and criticism’: ‘referring to or quoting from other writers and researchers’, ‘giving some examples related to the subject’, and ‘referring to one’s own findings’. the analysis of the e-mail interviews with two of the writers of the articles in the corpus supports the results of the text analysis stage.