28.725, Diss: Commitment-detachment and Authorial Presence in Postgraduate Academic Writing

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-725. Tue Feb 07 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.725, Diss: Commitment-detachment and Authorial Presence in Postgraduate Academic Writing

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Date: Tue, 07 Feb 2017 13:39:43
From: Erdem Akbas [erdemakbas at erciyes.edu.tr]
Subject: Commitment-detachment and Authorial Presence in Postgraduate Academic Writing

 
Institution: University of York 
Program: Department of Education 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2014 

Author: Erdem Akbas

Dissertation Title: Commitment-detachment and Authorial Presence in
Postgraduate Academic Writing: a Comparative Study of
Turkish Native Speakers, Turkish Speakers of English and
English Native Speakers 

Dissertation URL:  http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/7083/

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
                     Discourse Analysis
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)


Dissertation Director(s):
Jan Hardman

Dissertation Abstract:

This thesis reports an exploratory and contrastive corpus study examining two
phenomena in postgraduate academic writing: expressing commitment/detachment
and signalling authorial presence in dissertations. More specifically, the
overall purpose of the study is to investigate how postgraduate academic
writers from particular contexts build their academic stance and voice by
employing a range of linguistic items that could be identified as hedges,
boosters and authorial references. 

 The corpus consists of a total of 90 discussions sections of master’s
dissertations, 30 from Turkish L1 writers, 30 from Turkish writers of English
and 30 from UK English L1 writers. A range of items, discourse functions and
roles were determined during the pilot study via Nvivo 9. Then, the whole
corpus was searched and analysed via WordSmith 5.0 based on the linguistic
item list signalling certainty/doubt or authorial presence. In order to
address two crucial phenomena in dissertation writing of postgraduates
represented by three groups, both quantitative and qualitative approaches were
adapted. Three key findings are as follows: 

- The postgraduates polarised: they either frequently qualified their level of
commitment or else they seemingly intentionally withheld their commitment from
what they asserted. The tone of writing adopted by the Turkish L1 writers
differed markedly from that of the English L1 & L2 writers, as evidenced by
their use of linguistic signalling expressions; the English L1 and L2 writers
preferred to sound more detached from their knowledge claims, compared with
the Turkish L1 writers. Therefore, the findings emphasise the importance of
the language factor in expressing commitment-detachment across groups.
 
- The authorial references included two broad categories: (1) Explicit
authorial references (I and we-based pronouns); (2) Implicit authorial
references (passive and element-prominent constructions speaking for the
author). The Turkish L1 writers and the Turkish writers of English (from
Turkish culture) appeared to construct less personal academic prose compared
with the English L1 writers. This seems to reflect a broader cultural
difference.
 
- In terms of the authorial roles identified in relation to the accompanying
verbs, the postgraduate writers tended to appear in their discourse most
frequently as (1) Research Conductor, followed by (2) Discourse Creator &
Participant; then (3) Opinion Holder. The rhetorical role indicating the
membership of the postgraduates to a community (either academic or
institutional), (4) Community-self, was the least frequent role adopted by the
postgraduates in their discussion sections.

 It is recommended that, in order to raise postgraduates’ awareness about the
writing conventions and practices in their disciplines, they should be
provided with the standards required with respect to style via modelling from
previous successful dissertations completed in their field. This is suggested
as particularly important for ‘novice’ writers.




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