Abstract
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.
Highlights
The existing literature on the analysis of writer and reader pronouns in academic writing has argued that these features could give an insight into the ways writers present their contributions and ideas and interact with other members of the discourse community (Tang and John, 1999; Hyland, 2001b, 2002), and has a self-promotional effect which markets the research carried out (Harwood, 2005a)
(1) We decided to use diathesis alternations as an approach to characterizing verb behavior, and to use the following verb features to stepwise describe diathesis alternations: (1) syntactic structures, which are relevant for capturing argument functions; (2) prepositions, which are relevant to distinguish, for example, directions from locations; and (3) selectional preferences, which concern participant roles (LIE.RA2)
As suggested by Bhatia (2004), genre analysis has expanded to take account of the social dimension: genre is envisaged as a strategic space for interaction among the members of a discourse community
Summary
In the last four decades, the study of interaction in language has had an increasing focus on written texts (Coulthard, 1977; Nystrand, 1986, 1989; Widdowson, 1982; Bakhtin, 1981; McCarthy, 1993; McCarthy and Carter, 1994; Davies, 1994; Bolivar, 1986, 2001; Thompson and Thetela, 1995; Hoey, 2001). They include: hedges, boosters, attitude markers, self-mention, and engagement markers (reader pronouns, personal asides, shared knowledge, directives and questions) This range of linguistic features has been researched in different genres, such as: popular science articles (Crismore and Farnsworth, 1990), textbooks (Hyland, 1998), student essays (Crismore et al, 1993; Intaraprawat and Steffensen, 1995; Shaw and Liu, 1998; Thompson, 2001; Hyland 2004, Hyland and Tse, 2004), project reports (Hyland, 2000; 2005c), and research articles (Hyland, 1999, 2005a; Hyland and Tse, 2005; Harwood, 2005a, 2005b, 2005c).
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