Cross-cultural Differences in the Construal of Authorial Voice in the Genre of Diploma Theses
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This chapter investigates the construal of authorial voice in the genre of diploma theses in relation to the specific communicative purposes that the authors are trying to achieve. Taking a cross-cultural perspective, the study is carried out on a corpus of diploma theses in the field of linguistics written by Czech and German students of English. The main purpose of the investigation is to explore how novice writers use pronominal self-reference items and impersonal constructions to present findings and negotiate claims. The results of the quantitative and qualitative analyses show that the writers generally manage to construct a coherent authorial voice. The author argues that novice writers’ choices cannot be explained only by a lack of expertise and a reluctance to commit themselves explicitly to their claims; they are also affected by the constraints imposed by the Master’s thesis as a genre, interference from the L1 academic-writing standard and instructions received in writing courses. |
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