Abstract
Academic writing has been said to display a tension between originality and humility to the community (Myers 1990; Berkenkotter & Huckin 1995; Hyland 1999). One of the fundamental ways in which this tension plays out is in references to previous research, or ‘attribution’. While recent research has emphasized the importance of attribution in academic writing—Hyland (1999), for example, found the average number of citations in research articles to be as high as 70 per 10,000 words—the role of attribution in spoken academic discourse is relatively uncharted territory. In this study of attribution in academic speech, transcripts of 30 large lectures from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE; Simpson et al. 1999) were analysed, totalling 250,000 words. References to expert sources in the academic domain were analysed, specifically third person attribution (including third person pronouns, proper names, and a selection of nouns), as in “um and, Marx points out that those are the tools that the proletariat are gonna use”. The research questions were: To what degree do lecturers situate intertextually the knowledge and facts they are presenting? Do the disciplinary differences found in written citation practices also occur in speech? How variable are the formal realizations of attribution in speech? Contrary to previous research findings (e.g. Biber 2006; Swales 2005), the study showed both that expert attribution is quite pervasive and that there is disciplinary variation in academic speech. The findings are compared to studies of attribution in academic writing (e.g. Hyland 1999; Tadros 1993), with the goal of contributing to current research on the commonalities that academic speech (lectures) exhibits with academic writing on one hand, and non-academic speech on the other.
Highlights
Investigations of spoken academic discourse are fewer and farther between than are equivalent studies of written academic discourse
Contrary to Tadros’ (1993) findings based on textbooks, we can conclude that the overall result suggests that lecturers make quite an effort to situate intertextually the knowledge and facts they present to their students, attributing content to other sources approximately half as often as they would be likely to do in writing
Contrary to previous findings (e.g. Biber 2006, Swales 2005), this study has shown both that expert attribution in academic lectures is quite pervasive and that disciplinary variation in the use of attribution occurs in academic speech
Summary
Investigations of spoken academic discourse are fewer and farther between than are equivalent studies of written academic discourse. 84 Annelie Ädel and transcribe) than written data Despite this difficulty, relatively large corpora of academic speech exist and are beginning to generate empirically-based research on academic spoken English.. The present study investigates the use of attribution in spoken academic lectures. Attribution has been investigated in several different written genres, such as published research articles (Hyland 1999); academic textbooks (Tadros 1993); doctoral dissertations (Thompson 2005; Thompson & Tribble 2001); and various genres of pre-dissertation doctoral student writing (Ädel & Garretson 2006). The research questions of the present study were: (a) To what degree do lecturers situate intertextually the knowledge and facts they are presenting?; (b) Do the disciplinary differences found in written citation practices occur in speech?; and (c) How variable are the formal realizations of attribution in speech?
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