Claiming a territory: Relative clauses in journal descriptions

The study of evaluative features of language has been a productive source of insights into academic discourse in recent years, revealing the ways that persuasion is achieved in a range of genres. This research, however, has largely focused on word-level features, such as stance adverbials and evaluative adjectives (e.g. Hunston and Thompson, 2000), with the evaluative potential of clause-level resources under-explored. Nor has research had much to tell us about the more peripheral genres of the academy which are concerned with the distribution, rather than the production, of knowledge. In this paper we address both these issues by examining the role of the relative clause construction in a corpus of journal descriptions, the texts which define and endorse the goals and position of a journal. Our analysis of 200 journal descriptions in four contrasting disciplines reveals that relative clauses have an important, and perhaps surprising, role to play in this genre, functioning pragmatically as an evaluative and persuasive tool to promote academic journals.