| In the last decades genre analysis is paying increasing attention to the social factors involved in the composition of the scientific article, the vehicle for the transmission of scientific knowledge.; When constructing a RA, the scientist's goal determines the type of information he presents as well the strategies he will follow to present it. Nevertheless, the differences between the norms and expectations of each scientific community will lead to variations in the strategies used by researchers to persuade their audience of the relevance and consistency of their work.; In this thesis, evidence will be found to demonstrate that the written text is a goal-oriented, interactive, and strategic phenomenon, and that it is interpretable in sociological terms. To obtain this evidence, Brown and Levinson's politeness theory (1978, 1989) will be used to analyse a corpus of 24 research articles from three different sciences. Subsequently, statistical results will be used to show that the relationship established between the participants in the interaction determines the writer's choice of politeness strategies throughout the text. |
