Abstract: While the knowledge contained in US patents descriptions is essentially the same as that conveyed by textbooks and journal articles (Myers 1995, Owen-Smith 2003), it must be shaped to claim temporary exclusive property over an invention. To effectively safeguard the value of such property, patents must reveal enough to suggest technical feasibility but conceal detail to cloud the specifi cations making replication easy. Usually co-authored by inventors and lawyers, the genre is therefore expected to hold a subtle interplay between boosting and hedging and gather traits from interdisciplinary discourses (Hyland 2000), in this case technical and legal. The aim of this study in progress is twofold: 1) to identify the linguistic act patterns used to match the requirements of legal patentability and the commercial interests of inventors, and 2) to bridge a gap in the know-how of readers and technical students by determining the discursive moves and interdisciplinary traits of the genre, comparing them with more familiar instances like manuals or specialized publications. To achieve this purpose, a corpus of 343 US electro-mechanical patents has been analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively with concordancing software at a macro (rhetorical) and microlevel (linguistic realizations). At this fi rst stage of the research, the prime focus has been set on the most common boosting and hedging devices which stylistically feature the genre and may constitute a lexical and discursive technolectal repertoire useful for both professionals and engineering students. Among the devices detected, some (e.g. signaling nouns and verbs, repetition, evaluative adjectives and adverbs, inferential markers as code glosses) are signs of a pragmatic deference towards the non-expert members of the discursive community (i.e. lawyers and potential investors) and prove to be effi cient means to overcome knowledge asymmetries. 1. Contrastive genre overview, research aims and framework The patent document is a genre seldom tackled in the LSP classroom, despite the fact that a considerable number of scientists and engineers often need to claim property over their inventions and discoveries along their professional careers. Myers (1995: 58) notes that their contrastive teaching is actually rare, although science and engineering students could be instructed on patent writing by paralleling the patent document to the research article, a genre they are much more familiar with. They could be taught that both report on some type of discovery – a procedure, a substance, or an invention, are products of individual authorship, consist of a title, an abstract, some claims, a narrative, references and graphics (Myers 1995: 98), and contain evaluative devices ultimately oriented towards persuading readers of the benefi ts and advantages such discovery may bring, but in a dissimilar way. This work is precisely concerned with the appraisal devices employed by patent writers in the light of Genre Analysis (Swales 1990, Myers 1995, Bazerman 2004) and Metadiscourse Theory (Hyland 2000, 2005), focusing on the linguistic choices used to express boosting and hedging (i.e. assertiveness and mitigation) in the most central move of the document, the description of the invention. To appropriately contextualize the following sections of this paper, let us begin by examining the main analogies and differences between patents and research articles: it can be said that they are epistemologically convergent but discursively divergent. That is, they basically transmit the same information but present it with a disparate rhetoric and different linguistic resources. As Myers (1995: 58, 66, 73, 91-92) points out, they also differ in their ends, their arenas and their discourse communities, as well as in their respective uses of intertextuality and their narrative constructions of future action.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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