Towards an Integrative Approach to Identity Construction in Academic Discourse.
Keywords:
identity, self-representation, stance, voice, positioningAbstract
Stance and voice are two different, though complementary, approaches to identity construction in academic discourse. Stance is mostly restricted to positionality, while the construct of voice also sheds light on various personal traits of the writer. While the “stance and engagement” model of K. Hyland has been predominant in researching authorial identity in academic writing so far, it has a number of deficiencies, primarily lack of attention to different functions of first-person pronouns and reader pronouns, as well as failure to account for non-discursive textual features and other identity manifestations beyond positionality. Even though it has gained significantly less popularity in empirical research, Ivanič’s and Camps’ tripartite model of voice as positioning is a more comprehensive approach to identity in academic discourse. We put forward a theoretical framework that is essentially based on Ivanič’s and Camps’ categories of ideational, interpersonal and textual positioning, while also incorporating Hyland’s concepts of hedging and boosting to enable more efficient and structured analysis.References
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