Disciplinary Difference Of Authorial Representation In English Research Articles

This thesis compares the use of authorial representation in English research articles(RA in the following)in four disciplines to investigate whether disciplinary variations affect RA writers' choice in authorial representation.Authorial representation has been widely studied by many scholars in linguistic field,and the previous studies have three characteristics.First,the previous researches mainly concentrate on the use of the first person pronouns in authorial representation ignoring the implicit authorial representation.Second,the classification of authorial roles in previous studies are different from that in this thesis.Third,although some previous studies shed light on the authorial representation in different disciplines,they put emphasis on the authorship and reader engagement instead of distribution and frequency of authorial roles in discourse.Considering these characteristics of the previous studies,this thesis compares both explicit and implicit authorial representation and five authorial roles in different disciplines in English RAs of four disciplines.First,this thesis identifies the linguistic realizations of both explicit and implicit authorial representation and compares the distribution and frequency of these two kinds of authorial representation in four disciplines.The data shows that all the RA writers in four disciplines prefer to adopt explicit authorial representation,especially the first plural pronouns,to represent themselves in RAs.The writers of linguistics and philosophy RAs tend to adopt more explicit authorial representations than the writers of biology and electronics RAs,while the frequency of the use of implicit authorial representation in biology and electronics RAs is significantly higher than that in linguistics andphilosophy RAs.Second,we classify the authorial representation into five authorial roles,which are as writer,as researcher,as arguer,as evaluator and as promoter.And then a quantitative data analysis of the distribution and frequency of each authorial role in four disciplines is conducted.The data shows that the frequency of authorial role as researcher in biology and electronics RAs is significantly higher than that in linguistics and philosophy RAs.And the frequency of authorial role as arguer in linguistics and philosophy RAs is obviously higher than that in biology and electronics RAs.The above comparative results among four disciplines show that the disciplinary variations affect RA writers' choice in authorial representation.The investigation of authorial representation in English RAs in different disciplines is significant both in theory and in pedagogical implication.In theory,the findings of explicit,implicit authorial representation and the classification of five authorial roles will enrich the theory of authorial representation and enhance our understanding of authorial representation and authorial role.In pedagogical application,this study will raise RA writers' disciplinary consciousness in academic writing,and comparative findings also provide academic writing knowledge for teachers and students.