CADIS

CADIS

Corpus of Academic English

Research project funded bythe Italian Ministry of Research.

As an aid in the analysis ofvariation in intercultural communication, and in the identification of textualvariants arising from the use of English as a first language, second language,or lingua franca of the scientific community, we have devised a corpus formedby English – and in part Italian –texts for academic communication,produced by scholars and academic institutions in various parts of the world.

CADIS can thus enable researchers toanalyse the most significant macro-microlinguistic variants in terms of identity, evaluation andinterpretation in the light of recent linguistic scholarship. More specifically,the data allows an in-depth analysis of the following aspects:

genre and macrostructure, with their resulting lexico-grammatical realisations;
speech acts expressing positive/negative evaluation, both exophoric and metatextual;
pragmatic, interpersonal plane of discourse (stance, hedging, politeness);
evidence of popularisation and/or promotional discourse;
function of verbal and lexical modality;
degree of background knowledge required (content schemata);
correlation with such authorial variables as gender and academic standing.

Besides includingtwo alternative languages and representing native as well as non-nativespeakers, CADIS also represents four different disciplinary areas:

Applied Linguistics
Economics
Law
Medicine

For each disciplinaryarea, four different textual genres have been considered:

Abstracts
Book reviews
Editorials
Research articles

The structural complexity of CADIS reflectsits contrastive orientation: it is in fact designed to be internally comparable,so as to enable researchers to analyse and contrastthe chosen texts, not only by disciplinary area, genre, language and culture,but also historically. This is possible because the corpus covers a time frameof over 30 years, from 1980 to the present day.

The English texts were taken from morethan 30 peer-reviewed journals available by subscription through the Universityof Bergamo website. Because all the journals selected have a high impactfactor, we are confident that the content of our corpus is highly representativeof each specialised community from which itoriginated. The same principle is followed in the sampling of Italian academictexts, which have been selected from the most important journals available ineach field.

CADIS comprises 2761 academic texts,reaching a total of about 12 million tokens, selected and classified by disciplinaryarea, genre, language, author (i.e. NS/NNS), geographical provenance, date ofpublication and source journal.

Project leader:

Prof. Maurizio Gotti

Project members:

Dr. Ulisse Belotti

Dr. Larissa DAngelo

Dr. Davide Giannoni

Dr. Stefania Maci

Dr. Michele Sala

CADISCorpus (1980-2011)

The Subcorpora

Applied Linguistics (1980 – 1999) ENG

Applied Linguistics(2000 – 2011) ENG