Finding voice in biology: A diachronic analysis of self-mention in the discussions of an L2 scholar

Abstract

A recent essay published in this journal by Swales (2019), calls for EAP genre analysts to pay more attention to (i) context and (ii) syntactic and phraseological patterns and uses. In this study, I address these two issues by taking a usage-based linguistics (UBL) approach to analyse how a molecular biologist, who writes in English as an additional language for research publication purposes, constructs representations of himself over a period of nine years through the use of self-mention. The analysis reveals that while the focal writer’s inventory of self-mention constructions becomes increasingly productive over time, his core frame of self-representation remains that of the ‘practical agent’. Closer analysis of these tokens of self-mention in the discourse context, however, reveals that over time he positions this practical agency in different ways thus realising a more or less self-promotional tenor. This case study approach highlights the historical embeddedness of the writer and the text and the ways in which voice features such as self-mention are contextually motivated.