Premium
Traces of self and others in research articles. A comparative pilot study of English, French and Norwegian research articles in medicine, economics and linguistics
Author(s) -
Rongen Breivega Kjersti,
Dahl Trine,
Fløttum Kjersti
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
international journal of applied linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.712
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1473-4192
pISSN - 0802-6106
DOI - 10.1111/1473-4192.00032
Subject(s) - norwegian , linguistics , promotion (chess) , applied linguistics , identity (music) , psychology , scale (ratio) , research article , computer science , library science , political science , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics , politics , acoustics , law
This article presents a pilot study which has been undertaken as preparation for a comparative research project called “Cultural identity in academic prose”. The general aim of the project is to study which aspects of scientific activity are most important for what we may call cultural identity in academic writing. Whether such identities are primarily national or discipline‐specific is discussed. The project involves research articles from three disciplines – medicine, economics and linguistics – and three languages – English, French and Norwegian. The central questions are related to authorial presence and stance, to the manifestation of other researchers’ voices and to the authors’ promotion of their own research. This article takes a linguistic approach, and the pilot study focuses on the use of the following categories: first person pronouns, metatextual comments, explicit and implicit references and lexical items. The pilot study comprises 18 research articles; in the large‐scale study the corpus will consist of about 500 articles. In the pilot study presented here the main finding is that the proposed categories seem to be well suited to the purposes of the large‐scale study. The data also allow some preliminary hypotheses about ‘non‐expressive medical researchers’, ‘shy economists’ and ‘polemic linguists’ to be formulated.