Exploring authorial voice in English language medical journal abstracts in the age of AI

The impact of author's textual presence is easily felt when it is there. As a concept, however, it is somewhat resistant to description and analysis. The purpose of this case study is to propose an instrument for the analysis of the elusive textual traces of authentic author's voice and to explore how it can be implemented, reflectively, in educational contexts. Two critical assumptions underlie these goals. First, authors' authentic voices are poetic artifacts, rather than direct expressions of the mental realities of ‘real’ individual writers. Second, readers can construct author's presence and respond to it as authentic once they feel the author's consciousness touches their own. Within this theoretical framework, I analyzed two short texts for textual traces of their authors' authentic voices. Having located a literary text resonating with its author's presence, I analyzed it with this goal in mind. The analysis yielded a set of six qualities of author's presence: sincerity; self-revelation; creativity & innovativeness; intensity; interactivity and use of poetic devices. Next, I located a non-literary text, also exhibiting pronounced author's presence, to look for similar qualities. This analysis showed that this text exhibited textual qualities equivalent to those identified in the first. The two analyses suggest that the readerly sense of author's presence can be traced back to its textual origins, and that a pronounced author's presence in a non-literary text does not seem to damage its scholarly texture. These conclusions are discussed in light of the hermeneutic nature of the study. Next, I discuss the controlled and thoughtful nature of the act of self-positioning in professional writing, and recommend using the set of qualities of author's voice reflectively, rather than mechanically. Following this, I used a simulated written version of a think-aloud protocol to demonstrate how the set of six qualities of author's presence can be used in the process of revising author's self-positioning. An analysis of the planning and assessing moves in the protocol showed, that in the majority of the moves I was engaged in while revising the text,one or the other of the six qualities of author's presence was on my mind, either explicitly or in explicitly. Of these, regulating the quality of self-revelation was the most frequent move. The analysis showed that I did not turn to the set of qualities proposed in this study mechanically, as one would to a check list. Rather, they were invoked in my mind spontaneously, as I was assessing my written product and planning how to improve it. Following an analysis of the protocol, I finally propose a series of practical reading and writing activities meant to help students become more literate and reflective in constructing author's authentic voice in the texts they read and write.

The importance of the language used in brand-consumer communications spans many areas of marketing including advertising, personal selling, public relations, service interactions, traditional media, and, within the last decade, digital and social media marketing. The present research provides an exploratory investigation on the use of first (e.g., “I”) and second (e.g., “You”) person singular pronouns in brand-consumer communications on the popular social networking platform, Facebook. In particular, archival data from brand administrator and fan posts on Facebook were collected for a period of 45 days. Initial findings suggest that first- and second-person singular pronoun usage is higher in consumer comments than in brand posts. On the other hand, brand posts contain a higher proportion of second-person (vs. first-person) singular pronouns, while consumer comments contain a higher proportion of first-person (vs. second-person) singular pronouns. Brand posts contain a higher portion of second-person singular pronouns than do consumer comments. Finally, consumer comments contain a higher proportion of first-person singular pronouns than do brand posts. Managerial implications and opportunities for future research are discussed.

Exploring Authorial Presence Through the Use of First Person Pronouns: Evidence from a Saudi University

Analytic adjectival passives are common in Indo‐European. The participle around which they are constructed has a stative or property interpretation, unlike verbal (“eventive”) passives (whether analytic or synthetic). Like verbal passives, their defining characteristic is that their surface subject does not have the same thematic role θ (often agent) as subjects of corresponding actives (section 1). Other notable properties are that, unlike verbal passives, a noun phrase with this role θ is usually not structurally present, even covertly, and certain other complement choices allowed with verbs are also excluded, possibly due to the Case Filter (sections 2 and 5). Adjectival passives can be further divided into those which have the exact distribution and modification of lexical adjectives, and a more syntactic type with some verbal properties, lacking some interpretive and modificational characteristics of adjectives. The difference is illustrated clearly in, for example, Modern Greek. These two types may well result from different levels of derivational insertion of the participial morpheme (section 3). The similarities of adjectival and (analytic) verbal passives are pervasive, especially evident in Indo‐European morphology. In some non‐Indo‐European synthetic passives, such as Hebrew and Hungarian, the differences between adjectival and verbal passives seem more salient. What is apparent in Indo‐European is the distinction in which verbs select passive participles. Many verbs select adjectival passives, but only a few, so‐called auxiliaries, select verbal passives (section 4). For Indo‐European, earlier literature seems to have overstated the structural distinction, and it is plausible to argue that both types involve movement of object noun phrases to subject position. The differences between analytic adjectival and verbal passives are then possibly due to whether participial inflection is respectively interpreted as a property in Logical Form, or not interpreted at all, that is, inserted only in Phonological Form (sections 6 and 7).

From the Brontës to J.K. Rowling and Beyond – Have We Hit a Wall? The Status of Women Authors

Authorial voice, one of those constructs that shapes how writers establish their stance with scholarly discourse, lies within the centrality of academic writing. While extensively studied in Applied Linguistics, authorial voice has been primarily explored through stance markers, personal pronouns, and engagement strategies, with relatively little attention given to its construction through the Graduation system of the Appraisal framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics. This study, therefore, examines how Vietnamese EFL writers employ Graduation resources to construct their authorial voice in the discussion sections of TESOL theses to bridge the gap. Using the Appraisal framework, a corpus of 15 theses was compiled and analyzed to identify patterns of Graduation use and their impact on voice projection. The findings uncover the predominance of Force-based Graduation, particularly the linguistic resources of Intensification and Quantification, over Focus-based Graduation. This suggests that EFL writers tend to strengthen or weaken meanings rather than redefine categorical boundaries. The study also identifies three levels of authorial voice by Vietnamese EFL writers, namely, explicit, implicit, and unclear, depending on how Graduation resources are employed. While these strategies enhance persuasion, they may also limit critical engagement with existing research. Given the insights, explicit instruction on voice-related linguistic features is necessitated.

Authorial presence in academic writing is a fluid and multi-faced concept with its construction a troublesome challenge for both L1 (first language) and L2 (second language) writers of English. Authorial presence is particularly challenging for NNSs (Non-Native Speakers) who tend to avoid overly presenting their ideas, expressions and thoughts in their writing. This paper uses a specialized corpus of 45 student essays from a female multi-disciplinary university in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to identify and examine the presence and use of first person pronouns in shaping the author’s presence in academic writing. Findings show that learners use a wide range of first person pronouns to show their presence in academic texts and that these pronouns partner important verb, noun and prepositional phrases to achieve varying degrees of authorial power and presence. The paper concludes with pedagogic implications and suggestions for EAP (English for Academic Purposes) writing instructors who hope to tackle the use and function of first person pronouns more confidently in their classrooms.

BackgroundThe present paper discusses the lexical and grammatical peculiarities of English language medical case reports, taking into account their communicative purposes and intentions.MethodsThe objective of the research is to clarify the principal mechanisms of producing an effective English language medical case report and thus to provide recommendations and guidelines for medical professionals who will deal with this genre. The analysis of medical case reports will largely focus on the most significant linguistic peculiarities, such as the use of active and passive voice, the choice of particular verb tenses, and pronouns. The selected medical case reports will be considered using methods of lexico-grammatical analysis, quantitative examination, and contextual, structural, narrative, and stylistic analyses.ResultsThe research revealed a range of important stylistic features of medical case reports which markedly distinguish them from other genres of medical scientific writing: educational and instructive intentions, conciseness and brevity, direct and personal tone, and material presented in a narrative style. The present research has shown that the communicative strategies of the analyzed discourse, mentioned immediately above, are effectively implemented by means of specific lexical units and grammatical structures: the dominance of active voice sentences, past simple tense, personal pronouns, and modal verbs. The research has also detected the occasional use of the present perfect, present simple, and future simple tenses and passive voice which also serve particular communicative purposes of medical case reports.ConclusionsMedical case reports possess a range of unique characteristics which differ from those of research articles and other scientific genres within the framework of written medical discourse. It is to be emphasized that it is highly important for medical professionals to master the major stylistic principles and communicative intentions of medical case report as a genre in order to share their findings with fellow researchers from all over the world. Hence, in the process of training future medical researchers, the analysis of the basic mechanisms of writing a medical case report should be an integral part of the curricula in English for Specific Purposes at universities.

This study describes the use of the third person pronoun ‘mereka’ + passive voice in the writings of sixth form students. Analysis is made by comparing the syntactic structure of passive use of the third person pronoun ‘mereka’ produced by students through their writings, and the passive structure based on the descriptive grammar in the book Tatabahasa Dewan (Nik Safiah Karim, Farid M. Onn, Hashim Haji Musa, Abdul Hamid Mahmood, 2014) which is used as the compulsory grammar textbook in Malaysian schools. Data is gathered from 104 sample essays written by sixth form students of Sekolah Menengah Tun Sharifah Rodziah in Alor Setar, the capital city of Kedah. This study shows that students do not use the passive structure featured in the grammar textbook. In this study, the researcher applies the framework of Relevance Theory to proof that the use of the third person pronoun ‘mereka’ + passive voice is grammatical as the structure still conforms to the pragmatic rule factor. Keywords: third person pronoun ‘mereka’, passive voice, syntax, students, Relevance theory

The purpose of this paper is to discuss whether passive sentences with 'eul/leul' noun phrase can be treated as transitive sentences. We divided them into two types of passive sentences with 'eul/leul’ noun phrase and examined the grammatical and semantic characteristics to compare each other. After that, we argued that the passive sentences made of a type of 'ppaeasgida' have syntactic transitivity. Sentences belonging to this type indicate the meaning of the removal of the property from its original owner, and the event in which the change of owner occurs as the property moves to the new owner who is called an agent. In addition, we explained that the sentences are transitive constructions, and the predicates are transitive verbs, but they have the characteristics of ditransitive verbs with three core arguments such as ‘give’ and ‘receive’. Through this, we actively acknowledged that passive sentences with an object are no longer treated as an exception in Korean studies, and there are syntactic transitive sentences in passive sentences and transitive verbs in passive verbs as well.

The word “pronoun” can refer to many things; its name suggests that it stands for or refers to another noun. Personal, reflexive, reciprocal, relative, and indefinite pronouns indeed replace nouns, or more accurately noun phrases (NPs) or determiner phrases (DPs). Possessive, demonstrative, and interrogative pronouns can either refer to an NP or DP on their own or modify a noun to form part of a DP, and are then referred to as determiners. There are also “preforms” that stand for a prepositional phrase, adjective phrase, and verb phrase; the proforms will not be discussed here. From a diachronic perspective, there are many generalities in how pronouns arise. Thus, third-person personal pronouns often develop from demonstratives, and reflexives develop from nouns related to “person” or “self.” Since a pronoun is not stable diachronically, languages vary between whether pronouns are arguments, topics, or agreement and whether they are pronouns, clitics, or affixes. Cross-linguistic studies show that (subject) agreement is more frequent than pronouns and it is therefore important to consider the status of this (pronominal) agreement as opposed to full pronouns. If a pronoun stands for a noun phrase, the question arises as to what its syntactic category is, i.e., is it a D with an empty noun or a DP/NP? The answer is that it varies cross-linguistically. Pronouns can be specialized for the person, number, and gender of the referent and are, in many languages, marked by case for its grammatical function and for level of formality. Looking from a typological perspective, it is obvious that these marking are not arbitrary; for instance, third person pronouns are more likely to indicate gender. Pronouns can mark politeness and inclusiveness and exclusiveness of the addressee. The syntax and morphology of pronouns centers around the question if they are a D or a DP or somewhere in between. This question is obviously related to their status as full argument or as agreement marker. Languages also differ as to what features are encoded and how. The pragmatics and semantics of pronouns are also complex. In many languages, the topicality of the noun phrase is marked by the use of a full nominal, a pronoun, or a zero form. For instance, a pronoun may be left out (pro-drop in Romance) when the noun phrase referred to is highly topical and an emphatic pronoun is used when the topic is switched. Finally, references on acquisition and retention have been provided.

Academic writers represent themselves in their texts in different ways, notably through use of first person pronouns to construct an authorial voice and enhance arguments. This study examines how expert writers in the disciplines of Literature and Computer Science use first person pronouns. The hypothesis is that in the absence of objective fact, Literature writers resort to frequent use of first person pronouns backed by stronger authorial roles to build credibility and convince readers, while Computer Science writers avoid first person pronouns in line with conventional wisdom in the hard sciences. The findings suggest that the general dichotomy between hard and soft sciences regarding first person pronouns usage may not apply in all cases. Our study discusses the similarities and differences in the disciplinary conventions in Literature and Computer Science, thus making contributions towards pedagogy and scholarship of the role of first person pronouns in voice construction in academic texts

Purpose: Sociolinguistics variables such as age, gender and social class, among others, are said to bring the difference in the ways humans communicate. In this essence, this study investigated how age brings out the difference in the use of pronouns between three generational groups
 Design/Methodology/Approach: Group WhatsApp chats were collected from three generational groups of students based on their willingness to give it out for analysis. These three generational groups are postgraduate students and undergraduates (Level 100, Level 400). These groups were randomly collected from over four hundred (400 students of the University of Ghana and the University of Cape Coast in Ghana based on convenience. A quantitative research design was adopted for this study with the help of a corpus tool (AntConc) to analyse the huge data gathered based on percentages.
 Findings: This study found out that postgraduates and undergraduates (Level 100) use the first-person singular pronoun but postgraduates, especially those who represent the older generation tend to use the first-person pronoun more often while the second undergraduate group members (Level 400) use the third person pronouns. The study, per the findings, concludes that people tend to affiliate with others when they are young and lose group affiliation as they grow.
 Research Limitation: The study was limited to WhatsApp group chats of university students within the undergraduate and postgraduate academic levels who permitted their chats to be used. This resulted in a narrow scope for the groups used.
 Practical implication: The study reveals the preference or choice of pronoun usage among people based on their ages and the groups they affiliate more with. People may thus become more conscious of the choice they make of pronouns for usage as they become older or affiliate with older people. 
 Social Implications: the study re-examines existing literature on the use of adverbs, especially personal pronouns. Since many studies have been done on the use of adverbs, this adds a new strand of knowledge to existing ones on the subject.
 Originality/Value: It provided empirical data on the demographic, precisely age characteristics of the subjects used for the research that affects their choice of personal pronouns among themselves and others.

Background: Narratives play a central role in the recovery process following death, and linguistic properties of grief narratives can serve as indicators of adjustment to loss. The present study examined whether bereaved men and women differ in how they discuss their loss, and how linguistic markers relate to psychological functioning. Positive associations were hypothesized between first-person singular pronoun use and psychological distress. Gender differences were expected for different emotion and social process words, and overall word use. Exploratory analyses were conducted to assess the relationship between linguistic markers and psychosocial outcomes for men and women separately. Method: 50 bereaved widow(er)s and parents (29 women, 21 men; M Age = 71.16 years, SD = 9.95) completed psychosocial self-report questionnaires and individual in-depth interviews. Grief narratives were analysed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), a software program that quantifies words into linguistic and psychological categories. Results: Contrary to our hypothesis, first-person pronoun use was not related to psychological distress. Although gender differences emerged in self-reported psychosocial outcomes, we failed to find the predicted gender differences in linguistic markers (emotion and social process words, overall word count). Exploratory analyses revealed additional associations between linguistic markers and psychosocial outcomes, and gender differences in these relationships. Notably, first-person pronoun use was related to heightened grief avoidance. Furthermore, various linguistic markers were associated with increased depression levels in females, but not males. In contrast, nonfluencies were positively associated with indicators of psychological distress in men only. Conclusion: In line with the gender similarities hypothesis, analyses suggest similarities between men and women’s discussion of their grief experience. Associations between linguistic markers and psychological adjustment indicate that grief narratives contain meaningful indices of underlying health.

Reviewed by: Grammatical relations in Romani: The noun phrase ed. by Viktor Elšík, Yaron Matras Anthony P. Grant Grammatical relations in Romani: The noun phrase. Ed. by Viktor Elšík and Yaron Matras. (With an introduction by Frans Plank.) (Current issues in linguistic theory 211.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000. Pp. x, 244. $86.00. The introduction (1–8) treats general themes rather than discussing the individual papers in extenso, covering a wide range of noun-phrase phenomena in Romani ranging from the nature of Romani genitive constructions in crosslinguistic perspective (Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 123–49) to the possibility of whether Proto-Romani was ergative like other Indic languages (a possibility strongly suggested and well-explored by Vít Bubeník, 205–28). Four of the eight papers in the main body of the collection were given at the Fourth International Conference on Romani Linguistics in Manchester in September 1998; the others are independently-produced works. Romani is indeed a fruitful area of research for students of NPs since it possesses a number of unusual features. These include a dominant possessor-possessed genitival construction in which the relation of the possessor to its possessed is expressed adjectivally and a long-recognized two-tier noun case system in which the secondary cases consist of postpositions soldered onto oblique case-markers (even though Romani is otherwise prepositional and the two features can coexist, inasmuch as certain propositions govern secondary cases). The first feature is also found in other Indic languages whereas the second is much more unusual. Two of the papers are by the first-named editor, the first being an outline of paradigmatic noun inflection (9–30) which serves to orient the reader to much of what follows in later chapters, and the second a discussion (drawing upon the widest range of dialects [End Page 436] in this collection) of the surprising degree of variation in personal pronouns (65–94). The second editor has contributed a close analysis of the structure, function, and distribution of demonstrative pronouns, drawing on a large database of material from most Romani dialect areas. Norbert Boretzky provides a useful survey of the forms and syntax of the definite article in those Romani dialects which have preserved it (31–63), although he does not mention that South Italian Romani dialects use some definite article forms which seem at least superficially to have been borrowed from Italian. Personal and demonstrative pronouns, definite articles, and the areal distribution of the feature of external possession are also covered in this volume. In fact, areal linguistics is well-covered here. Victor A. Friedman’s paper on proleptic and resumptive object pronouns (187–204) points out that in the use of such pronouns, Romani noun phrase syntax preserves some distinctive boundaries which set it off from NP syntax in neighboring Balkan languages, whereas other features of Romani syntax are more readily comparable with parallel syntactic features in Balkan languages. The less than perfect typological overlaps involving Romani dialects are also exemplified in Mily Crevels and Peter Bakker’s paper on external possession in Romani (151–85), where they show that the boundaries between the occurrence of external possession in Romani dialects and its use in coterritorial languages, though similar both in the shared presence of such features in certain dialects (for instance, varieties of Vlax Romani in contact with many Central European languages) and their shared absence in certain other dialects (for instance, Welsh Romani), do not always coincide. (Sinti dialects lack external possession although German, the language which has influenced them most strongly, has it.) The editors have chosen an especially rich focus for their collection without exhausting its possibilities. Further themes are still to be explored in greater depth (for instance, a pandialectal study of Romani adjectival comparative morphology and constructions, with due attention to instances of suppletion, would repay the effort), but a good start has been made here. Anthony P. Grant University of Sheffield, UK Copyright © 2003 Linguistic Society of America