Realizations Of Writer Voice In Engagement System

In academic writing, writers express different voices towards the citations they have referred to. Based on Hood’s (2004) classification of writer voice and Martin and White’s (2008) Engagement System, the present study aims to explore what kinds of voices writers express towards citations in different disciplines and how these voices are realized in Engagement System. Targeting at this aim, the present study attempts to address the following questions:What are the distributions of different writer voices in medicine and linguistics? How are those voices realized in Engagement System? And what are the similarities and differences between the corpora?The corpora used in this study consist of 5,228 citations sampled from 50 Literature Reviews in English PhD dissertations of two disciplines—medicine and linguistics. Different citation types were labeled according to Swales’(1990) classification of citation. Based on the distribution of different citation types, the present study drew the conclusion that writers in medicine mainly express two kinds of voices—Investigator Voice and Critic Voice, while writers in linguistics also express these two kinds of voices but Critic Voice is the major one.To probe into how these voices are realized in Engagement System, the present study selected and labeled Engagement resources used in all citations and presented their distribution. The results indicated that in medicine, Investigator Voice was mainly realized in Engagement System of contraction—isclaim—counter—"though" and Critic Voice was mainly realized in contraction—proclaim—endorse—"find". In linguistics, Investigator Voice was mainly realized in contraction—disclaim—deny—"not" and Critic Voice was mainly in expansion—attribute—acknowledge—"argue", "describe" and "report".Disciplinary similarities and differences were found in the realizations of the same writer voice in Engagement System. More similarities than differences were found in the realizations of Investigator Voice in Engagement System and more differences than similarities were observed in the realizations of Critic Voice in the two disciplines. Finally, the writer gave a tentative explanation for the similarities and differences between the two disciplines. In the conclusion part, the thesis pointed out two limitations of the present study—the research method is, to some degree, subjective and the research corpus is less sufficient. Finally the thesis discussed pedagogical implications and suggestions for future studies.