CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN TEXT FORMATION IN RESEARCH PAPERS/ORGANISATION

In: Culture crossroads: journal of the Research Centre at the Latvian Academy of Culture, Volume 7, p. 277-285

Abstract

Research texts have been explored by linguists from various aspects for a long time: however, in 1987 Michael Clyne's publication on cultural differences in English and German research texts urged linguists to turn to search for common and distinct features in research texts written in different languages. Thus, a number of pieces of contrastive research have been written over the recent 25 years not only on texts written in English and German, but also in Spanish, Italian etc. Research texts in Latvian have been less investigated from the contrastive aspect. However, Prof. Andrejs Veisbergs, for instance, regularly publishes his observations on changes in Latvian research texts at the turn of the 20th and the 21st centuries. This article gives a survey of the results of the above research: it also offers and insight into the concepts on the principles of research text formation developed by young researchers in Latvia. This is highlighted by MA and PhD students from 2009 till 2015. The results of this survey reveal that young researchers in Latvia have not shaped clear research text formation principles that are characteristic of a specific culture.