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Languages in Contrast: Online-First Articles

Academic voice in the rhetorical construction of author identity

An intercultural rhetorical perspective

ORCID logo | Shanghai Maritime UniversityChina
This paper compares the linguistic features contributing to the construction of academic voice in English, Chinese and Translation corpora consisting of 180 research article introductions (RAIs) in the fields of biology, geology, and material science. The study reveals significant differences in the strategies for constructing academic voice across languages. In comparison to the English Corpus, the Translation Corpus exhibits higher or nearly equal normalized frequencies of certain linguistic features, such as hedges, first-person pronouns, and passivizations. This pattern may suggest that Chinese authors project a less confident, less committed, and less interactive voice in academic English discourse. Moreover, the uncritical academic voice that emphasizes authority in Chinese-authored English RAIs may be attributed to their mother language background. Finally, we discuss the implications of this study for multilingual professional writing and the teaching of academic writing within the paper.
Keywords: academic voice, intercultural rhetoric, linguistic features, research article introductions, Chinese/English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Understanding of academic voice
    • 2.2Linguistic features contributing to voice construction in academic discourse
    • 2.3Intercultural rhetorical studies related to academic voice
  • 3.Research design
    • 3.1Corpus
    • 3.2Taxonomy of linguistic features contributing to academic voice construction
    • 3.3Corpus annotation and data analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1General description of the frequency of the linguistic features
    • 4.2Contrastive analysis at the lexico-grammatical level
    • 4.3Contrastive analysis at the syntactic level
    • 4.4Contrastive analysis at the discourse level
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
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