Academic Voice Of Chinese Scholars And Construction Of Academic Identity

With the growing academic influence of Chinese scholars,their situation of overseas publication has attracted much attention.Many editorial board members believed that self-mentions,citations and other linguistic resources that can construct voice were the clues for their judgement of the writer.Therefore,the research of voice is of great significance to overseas academic publications.Previous research revealed the difficulties that Chinese scholars encounter from the perspective of language competence.However,few scholars have explored the situation of overseas publications of Chinese scholars from the perspective of voice.This thesis aims to answer the following questions:What voice resources are adopted by Chinese scholars in their articles?What are the distribution characteristics of these resources?How do Chinese scholars invite readers to engage in the articles and realize the interaction with readers?How do Chinese scholars construct the writer's identity and achieve their purposes in their articles?This thesis combines the research methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis.The self-built corpus randomly selects 50 research articles published by Chinese scholars on five international academic journals in the field of linguistics and sets a time span from 2010 to 2019.UAM Corpus Tool is used as the tool to create projects and annotate the imported corpus based on the different levels of voice resources.Statistics and analysis of voice features are also conducted.The major findings of this thesis are summarized below:Firstly,from the perspectives of overall distribution of voice resources in academic articles,the reader's voice resources are the most commonly used linguistic devices that shape the identity of the writer,followed by those of other voices.It shows that Chinese scholars have a tendency to align with the putative readers.When expressing personal views,they choose to use other voices to increase the persuasiveness of opinions.Secondly,through the analysis of writer-oriented voice features,it is found that writers tend to use vague expressions such as hedges to leave enough dialogic space for the readers.It indicates Chinese scholars'conservative characteristics and lack of confidence.Generally speaking,writer positioning is achieved by the use of stance.The writer's identity of openness is established through the high frequency of hedges,low frequency of boosters,positive attitude markers,self-references in the name of the research.Thirdly,the writer-reader relationship can reflect the identity of the writer.Chinese scholars prefer to use frame markers and reader pronouns to align with the putative readers.The main function of the use of reader-oriented linguistic resources is to guide the readers to understand the academic research articles rather than invite them to negotiate over the arguments.Therefore,the writer's role constructed by Chinese scholars in the academic articles is a server rather than a leader.Fourthly,writer's identity is also constructed by other voices.The Chinese scholars rely on the voices of other scholars when establishing their own authorities.In each part of the research articles,the frequency of different types of citation is quite high,indicating that the writer hopes to establish an authoritative and objective academic identity and avoid being questioned by the readers.This study provides pedagogical implication for the teachers of academic writing courses and suggestions for the overseas publication of Chinese scholars and postgraduate students.