The Rhetorical Analysis of Criticism in Persian and English Linguistics Papers

Successful academic writing depends on being familiar with different rhetorical strategies. One of these strategies used by authors of scientific articles is the act of criticism, the criticism of the previous works or other members of their respective communities. Actually this helps writers to justify their own study and to create a gap. Therefore the sociopragmatic variable of Academic Conflict (AC) has been investigated in different academic genres and disciplines. This study aims to examine this variable in linguistics papers in Persian and English. To this end a corpus of 60 papers, 30 in Persian and 30 in English, have been chosen randomly. First in the quantitative phase of the study, the direct and indirect AC variables that have been used for critical speech acts were compared by within and between languages and then in a qualitative examine, the discourse analysis of important features were examined to show the probable relations to the cultural contexts. The results showed that English writers used more criticism acts than Persian writers and both groups used direct AC more than indirect one. Although both groups of papers are written in different cultural contexts, the strategies used by authors seem familiar and have minute differences and this may show that the effect of discipline and the language of instruction are more than cultural contexts in rhetoric of criticism.