Abstract:

The article deals with the important issue of studying prior texts in academic discourse. Prior texts in science have cognitive significance for scientists; they are constantly renewed in their discourse. These are ready-made intellectual blocks used as a tool that facilitates the switching from the factual context of thought to the mental one.
The relevance of this paper is determined by the interest in the mechanisms involved in knowledge deployment. Scientific texts are in constant interaction, at a certain phase of their functioning some of them become super compressive and prominent to all scientists. Such texts are continuously reproduced in the academic discourse and are the basis of scientific knowledge in a concentrated, concise form, they are well known to the scientific community.

The research objective is to analyze Spanish academic discourse features in order to identify groups of compressed prior texts that have high semantic volume and minimal formal capacity, since they are the summarized result of the content of source texts.
The research material includes natural science articles and theses of Spanish scientists from 2005 to 2017 with a total volume of 11,000 pages.

The following provisions of the modern discourse theory are used as methodological basis for the research:
1. The text is viewed as a particular aspect of a broader phenomenon which is discourse and is explored by discursive analysis (Van Dijk, 2015; Demyankov, 2017).
2. Texts have a common property characterized by the existence of relationship between them (Bakhtin, 1979; Chernyavskaya 2017).
3. Any discourse reveals the traces of the preceding discourse constructions (Serio, 2001; Danilevskaya, 2015).

In the course of the study, discursive analysis method, classification and systematization method, quantitative analysis method followed by a qualitative interpretation of the obtained data were used.

The result of the research is the classification of compressed prior texts in science and the conclusion that the reliance on prior texts and their concepts in scientific discourse is one of the system-forming features. In academic discourse such cores as compressed prior texts serve to store, develop and transfer knowledge.
The obtained results can be used in lecturing on Spanish academic discourse and in the practice of the Spanish language teaching.

Keywords:

Prior text, science, academic discourse.