Current approaches to academic communication view writing as a social activity and knowledge as the product of the social validation of claims. However, existing frameworks studying social interaction through language appear to be only partly apt for explaining socially generated linguistic features used to express objectivity. One problem with such frameworks is that they primarily deal with the articulation of subjectivity rather than with how objectivity is articulated. Another problem concerns the focus of frameworks, such as metadiscourse, which prioritize the explicit ‘manifestation’ of interpersonality. Hence, some lexico-grammatical structures expressing interpersonality, which are part of the inventory of resources used to convey objectivity, may not fit into current analytical schemes. In this study, I argue that the rhetorical structure of objectivity is worthy of consideration when dealing with interpersonality in written academic discourse. This study took an interdisciplinary approach to explore the use of personal and impersonal authorial references in a comparable corpus of 160 research articles from disciplines belonging to both the soft and hard ends of the academic continuum. The aim was to determine whether authorial references are susceptible to variation across academic writing cultures. The results indicated disciplinary variations in both the frequency and use of personal and impersonal authorial references, especially when the disciplines were compared for contrasting effects. The results also showed differences in the incidence of use of personal and impersonal authorial references across discourse functions, which could be attributed to the adoption of different interpersonal strategies within the academic discourse communities.

Authors:
Mohsen Khedri, Sohar University, Oman

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Mohsen Khedri is currently an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Language Studies, Sohar University, Oman.

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