Contrastive analysis of the Spanish and English passive voice in scientific prose

Espinoza, Ana María

doi:10.1016/s0889-4906(96)00034-8

Cited by 14 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…This policy, we believe, reflects the increasing importance of Spanish as an international language of communication and we contend that it should be followed by other leading journals in the field. article introductions (López 1982) and discussions (Vásquez 1987), and was later followed by lexical, syntactical and discoursal studies (Martínez 1994, Pak 1995, Moreno 1997, Valero Garcés 1997, Espinoza 1997, Fortanet 1998and Charteris-Black and Ennis 2001.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The scimitar, the dagger and the glove: intercultural differences in the rhetoric of criticism in Spanish, French and English Medical Discourse (1930–1995)

Salager‐Meyer

Ariza

Zambrano

2003

English for Specific Purposes

182

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The socio-pragmatic phenomenon of academic conflict (AC) is here addressed from a cross-cultural and diachronic perspective, and is examined by combining a quantitative approach and a qualitative discoursal analysis of its salient rhetorical features in a corpus of Spanish, French and English medical articles published between 1930 and 1995. The speech acts that conveyed AC were recorded in each paper and classified into 2 categories according to their level of commitment (direct author's involvement) or detachment (hedginess and AC responsibility shifting). The quantitative results were analyzed by means of the Chi-square test. Our overall findings indicate that French and Spanish scientists tend to be not only more critical, but also more authoritarian and passionate in the formulation of their AC than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. However, when analyzed diachronically, our results indicate that from the 1990s on, the rhetorical behavior of

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The scimitar, the dagger and the glove: intercultural differences in the rhetoric of criticism in Spanish, French and English Medical Discourse (1930–1995)

Salager‐Meyer

Ariza

Zambrano

2003

English for Specific Purposes

182

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“…Therefore, blindly following SFL in studies done on languages other than English will in no way lead to reliable findings. For instance, the concept of transitivity and agency in sentences is easily applicable to English language, but might not be the same for other languages, such as German or Spanish (Aschermann, Gülzow, & Wendt, 2004;Espinoza, 1997). The same is true for a language such as Persian, which does not have the syntactic features for a sentence in which the agent is not the subject.…”

Section: Issues Of Language and Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical Discourse Analysis in New Media: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges

Dehghan

Ali

2015

MJLL

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“…Therefore this study will utilise a specialised corpus of medical research articles, and because of the linguistic variation due to section type, I also decided to focus analysis on one section only. The section where passive constructions are more prevalent than anywhere else is the Methods section (Espinoza 1997). Thus, in the hope to find ample instances of impersonalisation, whether through passive voice or metonymy, analysis was centred on the Methods section of the selected articles.…”

Section: Corpusmentioning

confidence: 99%

We, ourselves and who else?

Rundblad

2008

ETC

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The role of passive voice as a device used in medical and scientific discourse to mystify the author is clearly articulated and well-known. Through analysis of the Methods section of nine medical research articles, this paper shows that metonymy is another frequently used impersonalisation strategy in medical discourse. Furthermore, this paper argues that impersonalisation is not restricted to the authors and that two types of impersonalisation need be distinguished: generalisation and socialisation. Discourse agents were categorised into the 'present authors' versus 'other researchers and health professionals not part of the research team' . Agents were investigated in relation to impersonalisation and social identity. Results show that possessive/causative metonyms are used to produce genderless, generic 'present authors' as well as 'other researchers' . In contrast, more significant 'health professionals' are often referred to in terms of representational/locative metonyms highlighting their authoritative social identity. The study also shows that for these non-authorial professionals co-occurrence of metonymy and passive voice is generally avoided. Although 'present authors' are mainly absent, this analysis reveals a higher than expected author presence resulting in a significantly higher degree of impersonalisation for non-authorial agents.

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Contrastive analysis of the Spanish and English passive voice in scientific prose

Cited by 14 publications

References 3 publications

The scimitar, the dagger and the glove: intercultural differences in the rhetoric of criticism in Spanish, French and English Medical Discourse (1930–1995)

The scimitar, the dagger and the glove: intercultural differences in the rhetoric of criticism in Spanish, French and English Medical Discourse (1930–1995)

Critical Discourse Analysis in New Media: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges

We, ourselves and who else?

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