Resumen de Intercultural and interlinguistic variation in the expression of authorial voice: the role and functions of pronoun forms in biomedical writing
Taking a phraseological approach (Hardwood, 2005a), this PhD thesis surveyed the use of the first person plural pronoun as a distinctive inherent linguistic pointing expression of authorial voice in a corpus of biomedical RAs. Given the hypothesis of an intercultural (L1 English vs. EAL) and interlinguistic (L1 Spanish vs. L1 English) variation of academic discourse (Lorés Sanz, 2011; Martín Martín & Burgess, 2004; Moreno, 2010; Mur Dueñas, 2011; Pérez-Llantada, 2012, 2014; Sheldon, 2009; Vázquez Orta, 2010), the main motivation behind this study was to map out the contextual variables which shape authorial voice in the academic genre and discipline under scrutiny. The question of variation was approached by interfacing corpus linguistics with discourse analysis (cf. Charles et al., 2009). This methodological design rests on the explanatory power of both quantitative and qualitative evidence obtained from the BHS SERAC 2.0 corpus. First, text-level quantitative findings of statistical and, respectively, phraseological nature were obtained. Next, the analysis centred on discourse context to gain a thorough understanding of the interpersonal dimension (i.e., writer-reader interaction, and discourse identity; cf. Ivanic, 1998). To grasp the pith of the argument of variation, the analysis was carried out within the framework of genre analysis (i.e., the I-M-R-D structure of the RA; Swales, 1990, 2004; Nwogu, 1997; Kanoksilapatham, 2007). The major text- and discourse-level findings on the role and function of pronoun forms and we phrase units point to some specific implications of the intercultural (L1 English vs. EAL) and interlinguistic (L1 English vs. L1 Spanish) variation in international academic contexts; these fall within the scope of the concepts of discourse hybridity, enculturation, and transculturation (Pérez-Llantada, 2012). Finally, given that, as shown in this PhD thesis, this construct entails the deployment of parameters which cover the modality function of language (Werth, 1999) and, therefore amounts to resources that empower the writer (i.e., authoritativeness and reliability), pedagogical implications regarding authorial voice are discussed.
