López Ferrero, CarmenBach, Carme, 1971-2016-09-152016-09-152016López Ferrero C, Bach C. Discourse analysis of statements of purpose: connecting academic and professional genres. Discourse Stud. 2016 June;18(3):286-310. DOI: 10.1177/14614456166345531461-4456http://hdl.handle.net/10230/27300As a discourse genre, statements of purpose are characterized by their occluded status in the academy and by their hybrid nature. Statements of purpose are required in applications for a place in a postgraduate course (master’s degree or doctorate) and they are requested to obtain information about the academic and professional background and skills of each applicant. A study of the genre's linguistic and textual features is needed in Spanish to discover and understand writers’ and readers’ perception of this genre. A corpus of 50 motivation letters in Spanish is analyzed here. We study the distinguishing macro and microtextual features of this particular genre and cooccurrences between both kinds of features. At the macrotextual level, statements of purpose display prototypical rhetorical moves, which can be classified as writer’s moves and reader’s moves. On the microtextual level, modalization resources and discourse markers are discussed. This multiple/nperspectives analysis of the corpus shows evidence of significant cooccurrences between modalization, discourse markers and rhetorical moves. Writers’ ideal representations of this discourse genre, which spans the academic and professional fields, can also be deduced.application/pdfengThe final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Discourse Studies, vol. 18, issue 3, 2016 by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. © SAGE. The authors. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461445616634553info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461445616634553Discourse analysisStatement of purposeOccluded genreSpanish languageAcademic discourseProfessional genresMoves genre analysisinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess