English

Leila Dobakhti,Norizah Hassan

doi:10.17576/3l-2017-2301-01

Abstract

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. Keywords: authorial-presence; first person pronouns; qualitative research article; quantitative research article; discussion section DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2017-2301-01

Highlights

It is generally accepted that academic communication is a social activity where writers need to adopt certain positions and interact with their audience in order to be persuasive
The analysis showed that personal pronouns were used to fulfill different functions in various sections of research articles, for instance, while explaining a procedure was more common in Results section, stating findings/claims was dominant in Discussion section
While quantitative research is more close to the hard side of the continuum and qualitative research to the soft side, this study aimed to find out whether the distinctions in these two types of research designs are reflected in their authorial presence

Summary

Introduction

It is generally accepted that academic communication is a social activity where writers need to adopt certain positions and interact with their audience in order to be persuasive. Hyland (2005) argues that one of the central ways of achieving such interaction is by taking a stance in writing. He suggests that stance enables writers to project themselves into their texts and present a persuasive writing. Hyland (2005) defines stance as the writers’ explicit presence and intervention in the text and the emphasis of their contribution to the field and construction of a credible position in the scientific community The concept of stance has been defined and conceptualised broadly and variously (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad & Finnegan 1999, Huston & Thompson 2000). Hyland (2005) defines stance as the writers’ explicit presence and intervention in the text and the emphasis of their contribution to the field and construction of a credible position in the scientific community

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