Voice Alternation and Authorial Presence: Variation across Disciplinary Areas in Academic English

Seoane, Elena; Hundt, Marianne

doi:10.1177/0075424217740938

Cited by 18 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 34 publications

(41 reference statements)

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“…Nevertheless, in this Med-RAs corpus in particular, the uses of passive constructions outnumber those of self-mentions. As previous research shows (Seoane and Hundt 2018), passive constructions are indispensable to create objective knowledge, apparently deprived of human intervention, in academic writing in general and in medical discourse in particular. Despite the voice alternation in genres and disciplines, it is easy to unveil the agency of the research experience reported by the apparent impersonal construction of a passive structure.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Raising awareness around writers' voice in academic discourse : an analysis of writers' (in)visibility

Rodrigo¹

2019

Brno Studies in English

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This paper aims to contribute to the study of the concept of writer's visibility inspired by approaches to the analysis of identity in written discourse (see Ivanič 1998, Charles 1999and John 2005. The way medical academic writers selfrepresent themselves in their research articles can be seen in terms of a gradable visibility cline crafted and constrained by the academic genre expectations of these texts (Swales and Feak 2004;Stock and Eik-Nes 2016). Traditionally, authorial visibility has been studied within frameworks such as evaluation, authorial voice and stance. Still, there is no framework as yet been proposed that binds together possible textual realisations that can be considered as visibility features in academic written texts. This paper conducts a study of 40 medical research articles that reveal different manifestations of the authors' presence. A cline is proposed that encompasses different lexico-grammatical realisations such as self-mentions, passive constructions and non-animated subjects followed by active verbs. These features can be interpreted as authorial voice realisations that allow us to measure or grade writers' visibility and its rhetorical implication in the text.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Raising awareness around writers' voice in academic discourse : an analysis of writers' (in)visibility

Rodrigo¹

2019

Brno Studies in English

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“…Dorgeloh & Wanner (2009) explain the use of this so-called ‘paper construction’ in academic writing – which they find is first used in the twentieth century – by pointing out specific requirements of the genre, focusing on rhetorical functions such as allowing the author to leave him/herself unmentioned. A study by Seoane & Hundt (2017) further illustrates that this choice is not just linguistic, but stylistic, with important differences between disciplines in the amount of so-called authorial involvement. Impersonalisation strategies can also be relevant for other permissive subjects; for example, 1492 saw… replaces In 1492 we/people saw… .…”

Section: Permissive Subjects In Present-day English: Definition and Ementioning

confidence: 99%

‘Fifty pounds will buy me a pair of horses for my carriage’: the history of permissive subjects in English

Dreschler

2019

English Language and Linguistics

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This article investigates the history of so-called permissive subjects in English, for example The tent sleeps four: inanimate, non-agentive subjects used with verbs that normally take animate, agentive subjects. Although permissive subjects are assumed in the literature to be innovations, there is little information available on their use and frequency. Using historical corpora, I provide an account of the history of permissive subjects with five verbs – see, buy, seat, sleep and sell. The results show that permissive subjects with see and buy are already found in the sixteenth century, while those with seat and sell occur from the nineteenth century onwards, and those with sleep first occur in the twentieth century. The five types also differ in other respects, with genre and functional motivations playing an important role. Crucially, there is an increase in the overall use of these permissive subjects, which follows the increase in subject-initial clauses and a more marked use of the presubject position as described by Los & Dreschler (2012), supporting their proposal that several subject-creating strategies – passives, middles and permissive subjects – became more frequent in English due to changes in the pragmatic character of the clause-initial position, in turn caused by the loss of verb second.

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“…He argues that this process has profoundly shaped discourse, for example, by an increasing acceptance of non-standard varieties in institutional discourse, the reduction of overt markers of power, and traditionally formal discourse types becoming more informal. Since Fairclough’s work, the term has been used in various studies in different areas of linguistics without necessarily subscribing to the principles of CDA (e.g., Leech, Hundt, Mair & Smith 2009; Flowerdew 2012; Spirling 2016; Seoane & Hundt 2017). Examples of specific linguistic changes attributed to democratization include the decrease of deontic modals and the rise of semi-modals, and the elimination of overtly sexist features in language, such as generic he and occupational terms ending in – man (Farrelly & Seoane 2012:394).…”

Section: Discursive and Linguistic Democratizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Democratization and Gender-neutrality in English(es)

Loureiro‐Porto

Hiltunen

2020

Journal of English Linguistics

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“Democratization” and “gender-neutrality” are two concepts commonly used in recent studies on language variation. While both concepts link linguistic phenomena to sociocultural changes, the extent to which they overlap and/or interact has not been studied in detail. In particular, not much is known about how linguistic changes related to democratization and gender-neutrality spread across registers or varieties of English, as well as whether speakers are aware of the changes that are taking place. In this paper we review the main theoretical issues regarding these concepts and relate them to the main findings in the articles in this issue, all of which study lexical and grammatical variation from a corpus-based perspective. Taken together, they help unveil some of the conscious and unconscious mechanisms that operate at the interface between democratization and gender-neutrality.

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Voice Alternation and Authorial Presence: Variation across Disciplinary Areas in Academic English

Cited by 18 publications

References 34 publications

Raising awareness around writers' voice in academic discourse : an analysis of writers' (in)visibility

Raising awareness around writers' voice in academic discourse : an analysis of writers' (in)visibility

‘Fifty pounds will buy me a pair of horses for my carriage’: the history of permissive subjects in English

Democratization and Gender-neutrality in English(es)

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