The voice of others and the otherness in textbooks: a polyphonic-argumentative study on Argentinian textbooks

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse the modes of configuration of “otherness” in textbooks written in Spanish. In a corpus of nine textbooks for secondary school published in Argentina, stemming from three different areas (Language, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences), the modes by means of which somebody else’s discourse is referred to are analysed within their utterance scenography (‘scénographie énonciative’, MAINGUENEAU, 1999 and 2004). These may be said to be the most evident places for otherness in the genre under study. The mechanisms of allusion to other voices within explanatory textual passages, as well as the different attitudes adopted by the author are also analysed. This framework takes into consideration those cues of markedly shown heterogeneity (AUTHIER, 1994), namely inverted commas, italic and bold fonts, which allow the author to refer to and comment other discourses. It is concluded that the scenographies found are usually used in order to incorporate in an explicit way those discourses that function as warranty to explanations, while other micro-discursive elements (namely inverted commas and the use of typographic variations) introduce both the author’s otherness and point of view in an overlapped way within the theoretical part, according to the norms of the genre.