discoursive analysis and pragmatic metadiscourse in four sub-areas of economics research articles

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) are two disciplines whose importance has been growing lately. This is due to the ever-increasing interest in the language that describes the most recent developments in varying disciplines and the need to communicate in and understand that language. One of the means for the spreading of those new developments in the different technologies is through research articles inspecialised journals. These impose certain rules that must be fulfilled by all researchers who want to see their papers published. Much literature has been written about this, covering most linguistic areas (see, for instance, Bazerman, 1988; Bhatia, 1993; Dudley-Evans, 1994; Fortanet, 2002). Many articles contrast different genres but rarely distinguish different sub-areas within a genre (Bridgman & Carlson, 1984; Malcolm, 1987; Hyland, 1988; Neff Van Aertselaer, 2006). In the present case, we will consider texts within the discipline of Economics. The aim of this paper is to show a structural, grammatical and metatextual analysis of ten articles recently published in very prestigious specialised publications, covering the most important areas of study in Economics. We conclude by making a contrastive rhetorical analysis of the four sub-genres analysed here. These are: Applied Economy, Quantitative Economy, Financial Economy, and Management and Business.