Specialized texts and discourse technical-professional communities: a computerized corpus-based approach

Abstract

Any attempt to support active membership participation of technical professionals in discourse communities is determined by the efficient competence of the specialized discourse through which the knowledge of each domain is generated, transmitted, and disseminated. The objective of this investigation is to describe the technical-scientific text types that 3rd and 4th high school students read, when attending three professional schools in three different areas of specialization in the city of Valparaíso, Chile. In this article, a general research theoretical framework and methodological procedures are presented; also, twelve texts types identified on functional, situational and textual criteria are described. Based on computational tools, we conducted a deep linguistic description of sixty five grammatical features in the most common text type detected in the corpus: technical-scientific manuals. The results show interesting text type heterogeneity among the specialized areas. Manuals reveal a degree of similarity in respect to the occurrence of the linguistic features involved.