The expression of obligation in student academic writing

Abstract

The importance for writers of negotiating reader relationships is by now well-established; this is a particularly delicate area for students who are of course writing for a higher status audience. One aspect of this is the expression of obligation, which up to now has not received a great deal of attention. This study seeks to address this issue by investigating some key expressions of obligation occurring in proficient student university assignments in the British Academic Written English corpus. A functional framework adapted from Hyland (2002) is used to investigate how the obligation expressions vary in use according to function. This corpus-based investigation reveals an association between lower ‘responsibility’ impersonal expressions and ‘riskier’ obligation contexts. Further qualitative analysis then explores the functions in greater detail to focus on the constraints that proficient student writers see as applying to these expressions of obligation. Pedagogical implications are then considered.