Voice Construction In English And Chinese Research Articles:A Corpus-based Contrastive Study

Voice construction is an integral element in academic writing,enabling writers to manipulate an appropriate authorial presence and scholarly identity and ensuring their effective negotiation and communication with respect to readers.Previous studies,however,have principally been concerned with how to construct a strong and an explicit voice by means of certain category of discourse resources like citations,stance markers and self-mentions.This line of investigation can hardly capture voice from a systematic and multi-dimensional perspective,and may fail to well explain its implicit manifestation and dialogicality in research articles(RAs)as well.Based on systemic functional linguistic theories along with previous discussions on this concept,the present study proposes a voice framework in RAs comprised of three dimensions of position,manifestation and source,and attempts to explore its construction variations between English and Chinese RAs from three broad disciplinary domains of humanities,social sciences and natural sciences.To this end,this study aims to address three questions:(1)Are there differences/similarities in position,manifestation and source of voice between English and Chinese RAs in the field of literature?(2)Are there differences/similarities in the aforementioned aspects of voice between English and Chinese RAs in the field of applied linguistics?(3)Are there differences/similarities in the aforementioned aspects of voice between English and Chinese RAs in the field of medicine?In doing so,this study compiled a corpus of 54 RAs,extracted from the Web of Science and CNKI databases and sampled from English-and Chinese-medium journals widely acceptable among respective disciplinary experts.All the voice resources in the corpus were identified and examined in an integrative analytical framework of voice and manually annotated with the UAM Corpus Tool,followed by a qualitative and quantitative contrastive analysis of the aforementioned three aspects of voice in English and Chinese RAs.Based on the above analysis,it is found that both groups of RAs employed a myriad of resources to negotiate self-representation and establish authorial presence.While the Chinese RAs used more voice resources than their English counterparts,the latter involved greater variety and complexity in the form and rhetoric function than the former as for the use of the same category of recourses.The cross-linguistic comparison in different disciplines brought forth the following findings:In the field of literature,the Chinese RAs employed more acknowledge,entertain and deny positions than their English counterparts,while the latter used more endorse,pronounce and counter positions than the former.In the case of the manifestation of positions,both the English and Chinese RAs relied more on the implicit manifestation of acknowledge and pronounce positions and the explicit manifestation of endorse positions.As for the sources of voice,both groups of RAs favored the intra and extra sources,with the blended sources as a minor category.Yet,the Chinese RAs relied more on the intra sources,while the English RAs on the extra sources.In the field of applied linguistics,the Chinese RAs used more contractive positions like endorse,pronounce,counter and deny than the English RAs,while the latter used more expansive positions like acknowledge and entertain positions than the former.Regarding the manifestation of positions,both the English and Chinese RAs relied more on the implicit manifestation of acknowledge and explicit manifestation of pronounce positions.However,the English RAs tended to manifest endorse positions more implicitly,while their Chinese counterparts tended to manifest them more explicitly.As to the sources of voice,the Chinese RAs relied more on the intra sources,while the English RAs on the extra sources.In the field of medicine,almost all the positions were deployed more frequently in the Chinese RAs than those in their English counterparts.As for the manifestation of positions,both the English and Chinese RAs favored the implicit manifestation of acknowledge and endorse positions and explicit manifestation of pronounce positions.With reference to the sources of voice,both groups of RAs relied more on the intra sources of voice.In view of the above findings,it can be concluded that there are both similarities and differences in the aforementioned three aspects of voice between English and Chinese RAs from different disciplines.On the one hand,their similarities can be attributable to the same genre of English and Chinese discourses as RAs and their resultant identical persuasive functions as well as the potential acculturation into English academic convention for authors of Chinese RAs.On the other hand,English and Chinese RAs come from different language systems and cultures,and are geared to the needs of different readership.These factors,among other things,can explain the differences in voice construction between the two groups of RAs.This study bears on some theoretical and pedagogical implications.Theoretically,it systematically elucidates the multi-dimensional construction of voice,disclosing the relationship between voice resource choices and dialogic space,which can extend the interpersonal research on RAs.Pedagogically,it displays the cross-linguistic variations in voice construction in three disciplines,which can not only help language learners choose proper linguistic expressions according to different disciplinary cultures but also provide pedagogical implications for the learning and teaching of English academic writing.It also provides valuable references for the translation of Chinese academic discourses.