Authorial identity and textual voices in English review discourse across disciplines

Abstract

Over the last decade, an increasing number of academic discourse studies have placed great emphasis on the concept of identity and the way(s) it is manifested in academic writing. Research on the field has suggested that academic writing is not completely impersonal, but that writers gain credibility by projecting an identity invested with individual authority (Ivanic 1998; Hyland 2001, 2002; Flottum 2005; Bondi 2007). As a further contribution to our understanding of the issue, the present paper explores some linguistic and discursive features that the interacting voices characterising the dialogic and argumentative practice in the genre of the academic book review article use to project their personal identities. Our own interest in this study is to investigate the construction of identity in different academic disciplinary discourses, in the area of the humanities and the social sciences: linguistics, history and economics have been chosen as case studies. Using corpus-based methods, the study tries to establish whether cross-disciplinary variation can be observed in the way the various voices involved in the evaluation of academic research manifest themselves (i.e. the authorial voice of the reviewer and other textual voices like the reviewed author’s voice). Particular attention will be paid to the lexico-grammatical categories of person pronouns, proper names, and verbs lexicalising certain cognitive and verbal processes signalling the argumentative dialogue between the writer-as-reviewer and the reviewed author or the other experts, members of the scientific community. A quantitative analysis of the corpus data reveals significant distributional trends across disciplines, and a qualitative analysis of concordance lines confirms that these trends are motivated by discipline-specific practices.