This book explores how the voices of authors and other researchers are manifested in academic discourse, and how the author handles the polyphonic interaction between these various parties. It represents a unique study of academic discourse in that it takes a doubly contrastive approach, focusing on the two factors of discipline and language at the same time. It is based on a large electronic corpus of 450 research articles from three disciplines (economics, linguistics and medicine) in three languages (English, French and Norwegian). The book investigates whether disciplines and languages may be said to represent different cultures with regard to person manifestation in the texts. What is being studied is thus cultural identities as tendencies in linguistic practices. For the majority of the features focused on (e.g. metatext and bibliographical references), the discipline factor turns out to contribute more strongly to the variation observed than the language factor. However, for some of the features (e.g. pronouns and negation), the language factor is also quite strong.

Additional background information on the investigations reported in this book can be found at www.uib.no/kiap/.

Table of contents

Preface and acknowledgements IX–X Introduction 1–28 Theoretical and methodological frameworks 29–49 Quantitative results 51–65 Presence of the author 67–157 Reader/writer interaction 159–213 Presence of the others 215–257 Conclusions 259–271 References 273–283 KIAP publications 285–288 Appendix A The KIAP Corpus 289–290 Appendix B Statistical tests 291–305 Index 307–309