Construction of identity in academic discourse

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63 they constituted a homogeneous group (p. 104). In line with Cherry’s (1988) and Ede’s (1992) promotion of situational voice, the two researchers subscribe to an approach which encourages students to adjust their voice in accord with contextual properties in a given setting without abdicating their L1 voices and identities (p. 90).

Another noteworthy contribution to the empirical study of discourse identity with special regard to discourse structure and actual social action emerging as functions of the articulation of various authorial identities is found in Shi-xu’s (1997) monographic work. In it the author delineates a three-step approach to tackling the problem of defining the ‘other’ in a system of cultural representations: 1. interpreting the discursive formation of ‘the Other’ in the context of social action; 2. constructing ‘a comprehensive, coherent and empirically backed account of the discourse of the mind’

(p. 18); 3. employing ‘reasoned-discourse analysis’ for scrutinising argumentation patterns and explanatory passages (p. 45).

Amid the polemic over the empirical and pedagogical relevance of inquiries into voice in academic writing (cf. Helms-Park and Stapleton, 2003, and Stapleton, 2002), Matsuda and Tardy (2007) present the report of a case study in an effort to underscore the significance of research on identity. The two authors, evoking Elbow’s (1994) definition, adopt a relatively broad view on voice:

1. audible voice or intonation (the sounds in a text);

2. dramatic voice (the character or implied author in a text);

3. recognizable or distinctive voice;

4. voice with authority;

5. resonant voice or presence (p. 236).

At the same time, they argue that even though some voice types may be more naturally linked to particular types of writing, especially in the informal register, academic

64 writing, despite its conventionally recognised requirements for stylistic neutrality and precision of wording, is by no means to be thought of as devoid of voice.

As a factor apparently detracting from a writing task’s potential to allow for the identification of the writer’s voice, Matsuda and Tardy (2007) point to the decisive role of the choice of context and situation when evaluating the research setting used by Helm-Park and Stapleton (2003) (p. 238). To substantiate their hypothesis, namely that the recognition of voice is of considerable importance even when it comes to assessing the content of academic writing, Matsuda and Tardy select a high-stakes academic situation in which voice seems to heavily bear on the final outcome. Thus, their research focus is on the blind peer reading process of a manuscript for an academic journal.

Tailored to this central empirical theme, the research questions probe into the readers’

construction of the author’s academic voice and the related discursive (e.g. syntactic structure, organisation, transition devices, choice of words, selection of topics and examples, strategies of argumentation) and non-discursive features (e.g. margins, font type and size, spaces, punctuation, extra line-breaks between paragraphs and block citations) contributing to it. To elucidate their position in the throes of the scholarly debate hinted at above, Matsuda and Tardy explicitly declare their understanding of voice by making recourse to Matsuda (2001):

Voice is the amalgamative effect of the use of discursive and non-discursive features that language users choose, deliberately or otherwise, from socially available yet ever-changing repertoires; it is the overall impression associated with particular features that make impersonation or ‘mimicking’ possible (p. 329).

Subsequently, they emphasise that voice is not identical with the mere presence of certain discursive properties in the text, but, instead, it is ‘the reader’s impression

65 derived from the particular combination of the ways in which both discursive and non-discursive features are used’ (p. 239).

Similarly preoccupied with the issue of identifying instruments for expressing identity in written discourse, Abdi (2002) embarks on an investigation to explore the usage of interpersonal metadiscourse as a vehicle for at least partially disclosing one’s writerly self (p. 139). He derives his findings from a sample consisting of 55 research articles selected from two disciplines: social sciences and natural sciences. The analysis concentrated on three tools of conveying interpersonal metadiscourse relations, namely hedges, emphatics and attitude markers reveals that authors of research articles pertaining to social science fields are more inclined to use devices of interpersonal metadiscourse than natural science writers. At the same time, it becomes well perceptible from the comparative analyses of individual articles that there is a remarkable difference regarding the application of hedges and attitude markers, whereas variation in terms of emphatics appears to be minimal. A contrastive look at the two samples also suggests that occurrences of hedges and emphatics significantly differ between social and natural science articles. Apart from these coalface findings, Abdi also gives a theoretical justification for the underlying utility of scrutinising metadiscourse features in scholarly enterprises aimed for attaining insights into the construction and disclosure of identity in academic discourse across disciplines and cultural domains:

Metadiscourse is a rhetorical means that is subjective and, as such, is more culture bound. Therefore, the investigation of interpersonal metadiscourse markers may be of some value in finding out underlying cultural constraints. This issue can be discussed generally and specifically. In general terms, one language

is compared to another; in specific terms, on the other hand, different genres of a specific language can be compared with each other to come up with a more detailed description of a language. The specific approach therefore has the

66 advantage of helping to discover a variety of identities for speakers of a specific language (p. 140).

Furthermore, Abdi also spells out some wider reaching implications for a more refined understanding of genre-related discourse identities. Based on his empirical observations, he is apparently in a good position to warn that general cultural typologies are no longer adequate to grapple with issues of identity for a particular language (p. 144). Instead, he calls for adopting an approach open to multiple cultural typologies allowing for a more nuanced description of generic identities and different modes of interaction. This conclusion seems to entail that there are indeed various verbal subcultures and linguistic identities.

In an effort to bring discourse identity research to a climax by drawing on all the theoretical and empirical foundations of the field thus far, but with a special emphasis on the developments of the past decade, as well as to demonstrate the applicability of corpora in identity studies, Hyland (2010) takes a look at research articles produced by two applied linguists of world renown, John Swales and Debbie Cameron (p. 159). To situate this relatively novel approach in the over ten-year long context of discourse identity research, Hyland synthesises the main pillars and the scholarly utility of exploring authorial identity issues in a series of compact assertions:

Identity is a person’s relationship to his or her social world, a joint, two-way production and language allows us to create and present a coherent self to others because it ties us into webs of commonsense, interests, and shared meanings. Who we are and who we might be are built up through participation and linked to situations, to relationships, and to the rhetorical strategies and positions we adopt in engaging with others on a routine basis. This means that it is through our use of community discourses that we claim or resist membership of social groups to define who we are in relation to others. Identity therefore helps characterize both what makes us similar to and different from each other and, for academics, it is how they achieve credibility as insiders and reputations as individuals (p. 160).

67 A similar take on the issue of discourse identity also materialises in Ybema, Keenoy, Oswick, Beverungen, Ellis and Sabelis’s (2009) theoretical work concerned with ways and conditions of articulating discursive identity, albeit in a socially and epistemologically wider context. The authors argue that the process of identity formation is inextricably linked to ‘self-other’ talk, which seems to have its parallels in the agency-structure dichotomy (p. 299).

In no way detached from the notion of reflexivity in the process of identity construction, as stressed by Ybema et al (2009), Hyland (2010), in his analysis, focuses on high frequency key words and clusters, and juxtaposes his findings against a broader backdrop of applied linguistics reference corpus. To explicate the rationale for the employment of corpora in identity research, Hyland opines that, somewhat contrary to previous understandings of identity as a basically interpretative recounting, the concept of identity could more conclusively be captured by casting it as performance.

It is in this dynamic conceptualisation of identity that the author thinks corpus linguistics does have a role to play in the description of authorial identity. As the main merit of the corpus-based approach, he highlights the chance to observe language usage as means of constructing an identity characteristic of a particular individual through a succession of rhetorical decisions. Hyland also sees a major advantage in corpora being capable of showing patterns of rhetorical choices rather than scatter uses of individualistic authorial solutions. Based on lexical frequency measures set against key words in corpora pertinent to the domain, he attaches labels to his two subjects, such as

‘the Radical Linguist’ to Cameron, through ascribing to her themes like ‘Establishing Truths’, ‘Challenging Contrary Positions’ and ‘Establishing Solidarity’, on the one hand, and ‘the Inquiring Colleague’ to Swales, through attributing to him motifs like

‘Self Mention and Reflection’, ‘Conveying, Hedging, and Attitude’, and ‘Engaging with

68 Readers’, on the other hand (pp. 167-181). In his conclusion, as if trying to reinforce the initial tenets he has set forth in the preliminary definition passage, Hyland argues

‘corpus analysis can help illuminate the ways individuals construct fairly consistent authorial orientations by using the disciplinary resources available to them’ (p. 181).

Furthermore, he adds that

while normative and constraining, the rhetorical conventions of our communities are also the raw materials from which we fashion our professional selves, creating, through recurring selection of a rhetorical repertoire, the people we want to be. Clearly this identity work does not preclude other identity choices in the writing of these authors, and on particular occasions they may well adopt different subject positions (p. 180).

A similarly fresh look at identity construction in oral settings is taken by Wieland (2010) imbedded in the context of situated communicative practice, which is shown to capitalise on normative conceptualisations of the ideal self (p. 504). She takes a view on the process of identity construction which is best described as ‘struggle’ (cf. Alvesson, 2010). She depicts the essence of framing one’s identity as an ‘ongoing communicative process by which individuals develop a sense of whom they are’. This holistically oriented understanding of identity formation is capable of transcending the boundaries of disciplinary and institutionalised discourse identities and broadens the horizons of identity research considerably by centring on social settings that allow for sociolinguistically and pragmatically more generalisable outcomes and findings.

A thorough treatment of issues of authorial identity in academic written discourse in a Hungarian EFL context is provided by Károly (2009). The author employs a contrastive rhetorical technique to reveal differences between native expert writers and Hungarian student writers by comparing the linguistics exponents of author identity, personal pronouns and various rhetorical functions (pp. 2-4). One of the conclusions of the corpus-based project combined with follow-up interviews with participating student

69 writers is that the frequency of personal pronoun use by Hungarian students far exceeds that of professional native authors. As an implication of Károly’s study, it is stressed that Hungarian students need EAP courses that are tailored in accordance with their cultural backgrounds.