Gender identity and authority in academic book reviews: an analysis of metadiscourse across disciplines

Abstract

This paper seeks to further the existing knowledge of gender variation in academic discourse by analysing book reviews by male and female authors, within the disciplines of Applied Linguistics, Economics, Legal Studies and Medicine. While research in academic discourse has established that academic writing is not uniform, but varies greatly depending on disciplinary conventions, the cultural background and the professional status and experience of writers (Crammond 1998; Hyland 2000; Hyland / Bondi 2006; Mauranen 1993; Silver 2006), the influence of gender in academic writing is still largely unexplored. Although some studies have highlighted the stylistic and interactional differences between men and women when it comes to writing (Kirsch 1993, Tannen 1994, Herring et al. 1995), few have investigated the potential influence of gender in academic discourse by considering gender together with disciplinary cultures in the study of academic interactions (Tse / Hyland 2006). Furthermore, differences in writing styles and author stances between genders has seldom been discussed taking into consideration the age, experience and authority of the writer in the field. In this paper I will thus analyse the use of interactive resources (transitions, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials, code glosses) as well as interactional resources (hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers, self mentions) of male and female reviewers in four different disciplines, taking into consideration possible variants due to age, experience and authority in the field. The material used for these analyses will be taken from four subcorpora of CADIS (Corpus of Academic Discourse), comprising 400 Book Reviews written in English by authors of different genders.