Making one’s presence (un)felt
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Date
2024
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University of Oum El Bouaghi
Abstract
Research writing has long been problematic in terms of authors’ authority and invisibility. Scholars and academics who belong to the applied linguistics research community are of two types: some prefer to intrude themselves into the scholarly prose, exhibiting a sense of authority
that is linguistically realized through the usage of self-mentions, while others tend to be less visible and distance themselves from their academic texts. In this sense, this research study aims to compare Algerian and foreign researchers in terms of the types and frequency of selfmentions
employed in their research papers, as well as to explore and compare the rhetorical functions performed by the self-mentions used. In order to reach such a goal, this study followed a corpus-based analysis in which two sub-corpora were compiled consisting of sixty research articles: thirty Algerian-authored papers and thirty non-Algerian-authored papers, which were selected from high-ranking leading journals. The raw data were cleaned and then analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings of this corpus-based study suggest that there is a difference between the two groups in the sense that Algerians tend to be less visible and less authoritative compared to their counterparts, as they tend to use fewer selfmentions, employing the plural forms (we, our, us). In contrast, non-Algerian expert authors tend to frequently use the singular forms, the pronoun “I” in particular, employing high-risk rhetorical functions.
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Keywords
Self-mentions; Research articles; Applied linguistics; Fieldwork sections; Algerian; non-Algerian