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Abstract Research articles are important channels for scientific knowledge exchange and communication. With the increasing competition in academic publishing and knowledge transformation, writers seek to employ various linguistic strategies to promote the research methods adopted and the value of what they have found. One of the explicit ways is to use hyperbolic and promotional language to glamorise, publicize, embroider and/or exaggerate aspects of their research – a phenomenon Millar et al. (2019) refer to as "rhetorical hype". Based on a diachronic corpus of English and Chinese research articles across disciplines, this study sets out to explore the frequency, distribution and hyped target of such a rhetorical practice used in English and Chinese academic prose in recent 50 years. The results show a significant increase in the use of rhetorical hypes, especially in hard sciences. In addition, English articles are inclined to promote the innovative value of research while Chinese texts place more stress on the research significance but less on the previous research outputs by the writers. This study contributes to the way students develop a better understanding of social persuasion in academic discourse and make appropriate choices of rhetorical resources in academic writing.
Key words: academic discourse; rhetorical hypes; disciplinary variation; contrast between English and Chinese; diachronic analysis
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