ABSTRACT
The current chapter provides a historical review of grant proposals as an academic genre, in order to unveil the essentials of a written genre that has become crucial among scholars. Within genre analysis, grant proposals have been addressed from different perspectives and approaches. They have been analyzed as rhetorical moves, from a corpus linguistics approach, or taking into account their social and cognitive dimensions. More recent studies have stated the dialogic nature of grant proposals, where members of the grant review committee and reviewers both stand as potential interactants where the writer’s previous knowledge and the reviewer’s expectations build up a grant proposal frame from a cognitive and pragmatic perspective. This holistic approach towards the analysis of grant proposals emphasizes the role of all interactants and highlights the expectations of the funding agencies.
