Abstract

In this paper we study the academic discourse of Economics, based in part of the PUCV-UCSC-2013 Corpus, collected in two university careers of two Chilean universities. From this framework, the first objective of this research study is to describe the functional rhetorical organization of thirty-eight texts belonging to the Textbook genre. The second objective seeks to determine the frequency of occurrence of the moves and steps identified. The overall results indicate a tendency towards homogeneity in the discursive rhetorical organization of the textbooks under study. This means most of these texts execute most of the most prototypical moves and steps. The quantification of the occurrence of some rhetorical steps revealed the existence of certain features present in all textbooks (Presenting Exercises or Examples), but others perform poorly (Solving Task). These features make these textbooks, on the one hand, resemble the Basic Sciences texts, but - on the other - they make textbooks approach the Social Sciences and Humanities ones. This dual or mixed tendency in the academic discourse of Economics reinforces the controversial character of a discourse that hybridizes in the process of seeking objectivity and scientificity. Another finding is the identification in some textbooks of an embedded suborganization in Macromove 2, which has been called Node of Conceptual Expansion and Strengthening. Along with this, the analysis in multimodal terms also highlights another finding: the layout of some moves and steps emerge as an important component in the construction of meaning oriented by didactic purposes.