Abstract

It could be said that the specialized discourse literacy (academic and professional) has just began to be explored recently in Chile. Advances in this line must start from a deep and empirical analysis of real data. Thus, one way to access to the specialized written genres employed by the academia is to begin from the tenant that all materials read by students in university training reveal relevant data about disciplinary discourse and knowledge. This article gives information about a research Project, in its first steps, at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaiso, Chile, focused on the collection, construction and description of an academia corpus based on texts collected in the academic and professional areas of four disciplinary domains of knowledge: Industrial Chemistry, Construction Engineering, Social Work, and Psychology. So, a revision of the concepts of specialized, academic, and professional discourse is presented. Then, the procedures of collecting and organizing the Academic Corpus PUCV-2006 are described, which is formed by almost 100 million words. Also, a preliminary text typology of the 652 text corpus is advanced.