A cross-disciplinary analysis of authorial voice in the rhetorical structures of research article abstracts in the fields of linguistics and economics written by native and non-native English speakers

Abstract

This study aims to offer a cross-disciplinary analysis of authorial voice in the rhetorical structures of research article abstracts in the fields of linguistics and economics written by native and non-native English speakers. The research addresses questions related to the frequency of authorial voice in abstracts, the differences between the authorʼs self-mentioning, cross-discipline-wise and cross-culturally, and its influence on the rhetorical structure of abstracts. The study is based on Hylandʼs (2000) five-move model and combines quantitative and qualitative methods. The frequency of the authorʼs self-mentioning across thirty-two abstracts from the two selected fields of knowledge was determined by specifying the distribution of the authorʼs visibility among the moves as well the forms of their visibility. The results of the study showcase the similarities and differences in conveying authorial voice in the corpus and are discussed thoroughly. We found that linguistic abstracts are characterised by a low degree of authorial voice while economic abstracts show a much higher frequency of authorial voice in the form of pronouns. We contend that there is a tendency towards higher authorial visibility among Anglo-American academic writers in comparison with non-native speakers.