The “I” in interaction: authorial presense in academic writing

2013

This study explores the discourse functions of personal pronouns and verb forms referring to writer and reader interaction in a corpus of 60 research articles in the fields of linguistics, psychology and educational research in English and Spanish. Drawing on taxonomy I elaborate and refine their categories, and propose I as the Interpreter as a new role in the continuum of writers' authorial presence. The analysis reveals that both English and Spanish writers make extensive use of pronominal discourse functions. However, Spanish writers use them more sparingly and prefer different functions when signalling their presence such as pointing to their role as interpreters of data rather than recounters of the research process or originators of an original contribution to the field.

2013

Academic writing has been recently defined as a social activity in disciplinary communities and cultures. As a result, there has been an increasing interest in the study of self as author, focusing on the way writers represent themselves in texts and how writers interact with readers. Additionally, authorial presence has been analysed across languages and across sections of the research article. This study explores the usage pattern of pronominal discourse functions across sections of 60 research articles in the fields of linguistics, psychology and educational research in English and Spanish. Drawing on a modified version of Tang and John's (1999) taxonomy of pronouns, I explain the frequency and usage of pronouns in each section of the research articles. The analysis of items revealed some differences and similarities in terms of linguistic choices writers make in a specific section of the research article in both languages.

Linguistica Pragensia, 2013

This paper addresses the issue of authorial presence in contemporary academic discourse. It considers factors influencing authorial presence choices and compares traditional assumptions to current practice in writing academic articles. While exploring the hypothesis that recently there has been a shift from the so-called scientific paradigm established by academic writing style guides to a more subjective mode of academic writing, the study discusses the results of a corpus-based research into authorial presence choices in a corpus of research articles in applied linguistics written by native speakers of English. The findings of the investigation show that the authors exploit various rhetorical functions of author-reference pronouns for maintaining the writer-reader relationship and construing an authoritative authorial voice. The paper also reports the results of a cross-cultural investigation into the ways Anglo-American linguists and Czech linguists approach writer-reader interac...

International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1998

One of the conspicuous differences infacademic discourse presentation is the preference for use of the first person singular ‘I’ perspective in some languages versus the first person plural ‘we’ perspective in others. This distinction is due not so much to purely linguistic reasons as to cultural ones. The purpose of this paper is to present some data concerning the employment of the two perspectives in English, German, French, Russian and Bulgarian research articles in linguistics and to suggest some explanations, as well as to point to certain cross-cultural misunderstandings which may result from the differences established here. An attempt is also made to investigate certain cross-linguistic and cross-cultural influences among the five languages. The analysis is based on 5 corpora consisting of 300 pages for each language.

2011

The issue of authorial stance has been the topic of much research. A rather obvious way to claim authorial presence is to use first person reference and the corresponding determiners. However, not only is the I emerging from the text plural, but different genres are associated with differing degrees of I-ism, and these conventions vary from culture to culture. In this paper I explore the issue of authorial stance in connection with identity by focusing on the use of the first person pronouns and their respective determiners in the academic writing of Italian students of English. The study shows that referential, vague and impersonal uses of personal pronouns are intertwined in a complex way and create shades of impersonality in a heteroglossic space in which a reconstruction of the self takes place.

2020

In this paper, we attempt to examine the identity of researchers in writing their research articles (RAs) by exploring the linguistic forms indicating the identity of the authors in English RAs, determining the functions these forms serve in the discourse, and revealing the socio-cultural aspects implied from the use of the authorial identity. We will identify the English first-person pronouns used by native and non-native authors in Scopus-indexed linguistics and education academic journal articles. This study applied the corpus linguistic method to collect the data and to draw conclusions about the authorial identity presented in the articles. Hopefully, this paper will help to not only comprehend the role and the importance of the authorial presence but also encourage researchers to represent their identity in their own RAs.

English for Specific Purposes, 2009

The notion that academic writing is not only a conventional entity but also carries the representation of the writer has been supported by several researchers. Few studies have explored identity representation in language across two written cultures, such as English and Spanish, although Spanish might be a language of interest for non-native speakers due to its international dynamism. This study explores the different identities behind first-person roles in English and Spanish by drawing on Ivanic's (1998) pioneering typology of identity, refined in Tang and John (1999) and Starfield and Ravelli (2006), and elaborated further in this study. The corpus is comprised of eighteen English and eighteen Spanish research articles (RAs) in Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching. The results of the analysis reveal some similarities and considerable differences in the distribution of the first-person forms throughout the articles. One commonality is that English and Spanish writers orient the reader through self-references. However, in other roles the writers in both languages inhabit the text in distinct ways, suggesting that the construction of self-representation is not homogenous across these written cultures. The paper also drawsattention to self-representation in the teaching of academic writing in EAP and SAP courses.

Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2010

A cross-cultural approach is taken to analyse Linguistics research articles in English and Italian in terms of 1) the use of exclusive first-person subject pronouns in English and first-person inflected verbs in Italian, and 2) the passive voice in both languages and si constructions in Italian. The aim is to determine whether personal and impersonal authorial references as realised by these features are susceptible to variation across academic writing cultures. The results indicate differences in the frequency of use of personal and impersonal authorial references across discourse functions. This variation seems to be due to the adoption of differing interpersonal strategies, subjectivity or objectivity, within the two academic discourse communities, and the dissimilar incidence of particular discourse functions and sub-functions, which ultimately influence the rate of occurrence of personal and impersonal authorial references.

L2 Journal

L2 writers likely perceive "good academic writing" as impersonal . Yet research has shown that every linguistic and rhetorical choice that a writer makesincluding, the presence/absence and different forms of self-mention-potentially reveals the writer's authorial identity . The dialogic nature of academic writing, as manifested in strategic selfmentions, has remained overshadowed in L2 writing pedagogy by other linguistic issues. This article draws attention to this gap in research: specifically, I report on the findings of a corpus-driven descriptive inquiry into authorial identity, operationalized as the use of first-person pronouns in a corpus of 126 argumentative research papers written by students enrolled in first-year L2 composition courses. The study examines how L2 writers practice self-mention, comparing the frequencies of firstperson pronouns in the argumentative corpus with both a "parent" corpus, which contains other genres produced by the same group of writers, and published research analyzed by Hyland . I also define and characterize the five qualitatively coded and quantitatively measured rhetorical functions of "I" used in the corpus (i.e., reporter, architect, narrator of personal experiences, conceder, and opinionholder). L2 writers in this study were found to use self-mention more frequently than published authors. However, L2 writers employed self-reference less frequently in their argumentative essays than for other genres. Their argumentative texts reproduced a narrative tone, as indicated by the lower ratio of the subjective/objective case of the first-person singular pronoun. A comparison of rhetorical functions reveals that nearly 50% of "I"s in the corpus function as a "narrator of personal experiences." In light of the findings, I propose pedagogical suggestions aimed at more effectively socializing college-level L2 composition students into academic discourse communities. _______________ Wang Carving out a Dialogic Space for "I"

3L The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 2017

Academic communication is now widely seen as a social activity where writers interact with their audience. Various studies have shown that authorial presence is one of the key strategies for achieving this interaction. This corpus-based study examines the degree of authorial presence through the use of first person pronouns (I, we, my, our, me, us) in 150 qualitative and 150 quantitative research articles in Applied Linguistics using the concordance freeware AntcConc.3.4.1w (Anthony 2014). The analysis shows a greater use of self-mention by qualitative research writers compared with their quantitative counterparts, suggesting that research design determines the degree of personal involvement in academic communication within the same discipline. It also suggests that while quantitative research is considered "objective" in nature, the writers still position themselves in their writing and try to interact with their audience. Qualitative analysis of discourse functions of subject pronouns showed great similarity between the two sub-corpora (qualitative and quantitative), stating results/claims and elaborating arguments as being the most frequent functions.