The study of authorial voice: using a Spanish–English corpus to explore linguistic transference

Abstract

The widespread use of English as the language for the dissemination of scientific knowledge is placing increasing demands on non-native scholars to use English as their language of research and publication. This can result in non-native scholars experiencing difficulties in drafting papers that are linguistically and rhetorically appropriate. This study 2 2 This research has been carried out within the framework of the research group InterLAE ( www.interlae.com ), and was given financial support by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación (FF12009–09792). focusses on the exploration of the authorial voice (namely, the sequence ‘exclusive we+verb’) of Spanish Business Management (BM) scholars in English. For such purposes, I analyse part of the Spanish–English Research Article Corpus (SERAC) corpus. The corpus contains research articles in English by Anglophone writers, and in Spanish and English by Spanish writers, and was built specifically as a tool for cross-cultural research, with the aim of identifying areas of transference between the author's native cultural and linguistic background and the international one, which expresses itself in English. Results show divergences in the frequency and distribution of the sequence under investigation, both in terms of function and tense (including the association with modal verbs), which reveal the existence of pragmatic and cultural factors that may hinder the projection of a firm, confident authorial voice by Spanish academics in an increasingly competitive academic environment.