Writer and reader visibility in humanities research articles: Variation across language, regional variety and discipline

Abstract

This study investigates variation in how research article (RA) writers position themselves vis-à-vis others through explicit references to the writer and the audience. Based on a two-million-word corpus of single-author RAs, the study considers several variables potentially affecting discourse patterns: language (English; Swedish), regional variety (British; US-American English), and discipline (History; Linguistics; Literary Studies). While nouns referring to the writer/reader were marginal and second person pronouns highly marked in both languages, first person pronouns—both ‘I’ and ‘we’—were used liberally. Regarding ‘I’, previous work has found that, unlike academic English, many academic cultures avoid it in research writing. Swedish, however, like Norwegian (Dahl, 2004), presents a rare case of outnumbering English in uses. ‘We’ orientations were equally used in Swedish as in British English, but less in US-American English. Differences were thus found across varieties, with British English showing a preference for ‘we’ over ‘I’, and especially authorial ‘we’. The disciplinary trends were especially strong for English, following the order in Sanderson (2008), with the most writer/reader visibility in Linguistics, followed by Literary Studies and with History last. While the findings show patterned behaviour for all three variables, the extensive in-group variation found for first-person pronoun use also demonstrates that these pronouns are not especially good markers of the genre, but that the RA exhibits fluid conventions, allowing for highly varied individual preferences.