Metaphrase and Paraphrase: Modalities for Appropriation of the Discourse of Other People in the Academic Writing

Abstract

How do researchers do to take up again, in their writings, the discourse of other people? This paper analyses the modalities of insertion of other people’s discourse in a text, by distinguishing metaphrase and paraphrase, which refer to the autonomy or assimilation of other people’s discourse. We mobilize a contrastive analysis that investigates the different modalities conducted in research and teaching texts written by Brazilian Applied Linguistics colleagues and French didactics colleagues. The research results confirm the initial hypothesis: the enunciative modalities in the insertion of other peoples’s discourse allow, to a certain extent, a generic characterization concerning different academic discourses: teaching texts privilege the paraphrase, and research texts privilege the metaphrase.

Keywords:
Discourse analysis; Didactics; Other people’s discourse; Enunciation; Academic literacy