Knowledge Transmission in Cyberspace

Since the beginning of the Internet, its features have been used to communicate knowledge between researchers in different universities or scientific laboratories, and later, with the increasing growth of the World Wide Web, knowledge became a collective good shared by its users. The current investigation has three main objectives: to describe the professional web forum as a discursive subgenre of the web, to illustrate the mechanism of knowledge transmission on the professional web forums, and to observe the variation across languages of the professional web forum as a subgenre of the knowledge transmission process. The analysed material consists in a comparable texts corpus, organised in five sub-corpora, in function of the language the participants in the web forums use to communicate: English, Spanish, French, Romanian, and Catalan. The analysis of the linguistic material of the professional web forum corpus provides essential information concerning the discursive features of the knowledge transmission process in different languages.