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Writer/reader visibility in research articles has been studied contrastively between English and other languages (e.g. Dahl 2004; Pérez Llantada 2010; Sanderson 2008; Vassileva 1998). This study considers several variables potentially affecting discourse patterns: language culture (English; Swedish), regional variety (British; American English), discipline (History; Linguistics; Literary Studies) and gender. The phenomenon studied is metadiscourse, defined as reflexive linguistic expressions referring to the evolving discourse itself, including references to the writer-speaker and the audience of the current discourse (Ädel 2006). The study is based on a 1.6 million word corpus of single-authored research articles. The English-language material consists of 96 and the Swedish material 70 articles. All three disciplines are represented in the English material, but the Swedish material presently includes only Linguistics. The findings include first and second person pronouns used metadiscursively. Nouns referring to the writer/reader were also studied and found to be marginal. Second-person pronouns occur rarely in the English and never in the Swedish material. First-person pronoun use exhibits considerable variation: occurrences of ‘I’ range from 1-28 and ‘we’ from 0.5-32 per 10,000 words. There are disciplinary trends in the English data, with an average of 15 occurrences/article in Linguistics, 11 in Literary Studies and 3 in History, following the same order as in Sanderson (2008). The results for regional variety are similar, with the exception of ‘we’, used considerably more often by the British authors. No major differences based on gender were found, in contrast to Sanderson (2008). In the Swedish material, ‘I’ is almost twice as frequent as ‘we’, which makes it dissimilar to both the British data where ‘we’ predominates and the US data where the distribution is even. The talk closes with a discussion of multivariate statistics, consistency in findings and research design in this type of research on scholarly writing practices.

References

Ädel, A. (2006). Metadiscourse in L1 and L2 English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Dahl, T. (2004). Textual metadiscourse in research articles: A marker of national culture or of academic discipline? Journal of Pragmatics, 36(10), 1807–1825.

Pérez-Llantada, C. (2010). The discourse functions of metadiscourse in published academic writing: Issues of culture and language. In Ädel, A. & A. Mauranen (Eds.) Nordic

Journal of English Studies, 9(2), 41–68.

Sanderson, T. (2008). Corpus, Culture, Discourse. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.

Vassileva, I. (1998). Who am I/who are we in academic writing?: A contrastive analysis of authorial presence in English, German, French, Russian and Bulgarian. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 8(2).