The language of future economists. A study of final-year dissertation abstracts

Abstract

In this article we analyse a corpus of abstracts in Catalan included in the final-year dissertations (TFG, from the Catalan) of students in economics from three Catalan universities. In the current sociolinguistic context, it is important to have a knowledge of the situation of theuse of Catalan in this discipline. Although there are some works that focus on the analysis of the abstracts of research articles in economics, there are none on Catalan. In addition, an incipient line of research on abstracts written by non-expert authors deals with texts in other languages, but not in Catalan, and not in the field of economics. The present study has two objectives: to discursively characterize the genre of final-year dissertation abstracts in the field of economics and to assess their linguistic quality. In order to do so, we analysed the macrotextual and microtextual characteristics of abstracts using Atlas-ti, a qualitative data software. The results show a textual organization in which there are two sorts of movements. Firstly, “prototypical” rhetorical movements and, secondly, movements which are inconsistent with the pragmatic and sociocultural dimensions of the genre. In terms of metadiscursive resources (Hyland, 2005), the most frequent are transitional metadiscursive markers and frame markers; from the point of view of the variety of forms, the texts are relatively poor. In terms of linguistic quality, the results indicate that future economists make both linguistic and discursive mistakes that recommend a didactic action in the university degree courses to improve the quality of academic writing in Catalan.