学术期刊论文摘要中的立场与介入--第一人称代词we的历时考察

Stance and Engagement in Research Article Abstracts: A Diachronic Study of the First-person Pronoun We

立场和介入是近年来学术语篇研究中的重要问题之一,但鲜有研究从历时角度考察我国学术话语中立场和介入的特征。本文以我国外语类期刊语言学研究论文英文摘要为语料,历时考察2001年至2020年间第一人称复数代词we作为立场标记和介入标记在语料中的分布。本文区分3种we,即we_(1)(指代单一作者)、we_(2)(指代多位作者)及we;(指代作者和读者)。We_(1)和we_(2)是自我提及语,属于作者立场资源,we_(3)是读者指代,属于读者介入资源。语料分析表明,20年间,我国外语类语言学研究论文英文摘要中we作为立场标记和介入标记,使用频率总体上均呈现显著下降趋势。结果表明,我国学者在期刊论文摘要中凸显自我身份的策略与国际学者日益趋同,但仍存在作者凸显度不足的问题。

Stance and engagement have been hot issues in academic discourse studies recently,however,few studies have been carried out on the first-person pronoun we. It is used to show explicit authorial stance and to engage the readers according to Hyland’s( 2005) theoretical framework. Based on Hyland( 2005),this paper undertakes a diachronic analysis of the first-person pronoun we in English abstracts of linguistic research articles in China from 2001 to 2020. The study is based on a diachronic corpus of English abstracts of about 1. 4 million words in total. The abstracts are taken from 10 top journals of foreign language studies in China.Three types of we are distinguished in the paper,namely we_(1)( metonymic we referring to single author),we_(2)( literal we referring to multi-authors),and we_(3)( referring to both the author/s and the readers),with we1and we2functioning as stance markers,and we3as an engagement marker. Corpus data reveal that 71. 00% of we function as stance markers,with we1taking up 35. 27% and we235. 73%,and 29. 00% of we function as engagement markers. The occurrence of we_(1),we_(2)and we_(3) is also calculated,with the normalized frequency of 4. 40 per 10,000 words( hereinafter referred to as pttw),4. 45 pttw and 3. 62 pttw,respectively. Corpus data show that there has been a significant decrease of we both as stance markers and as engagement markers over the past 20 years.However,it is interesting to note that although the stance marker we has experienced a sharp decline in general,the occurrence of metonymic we1and literal we2has opposite trends,with we1declining significantly from 9. 43 pttw in 2001 to 1. 97 pttw in 2020( LL =41. 24,p = 0. 000***) and that of we2rising significantly from 2. 85 pttw to 7. 39 pttw( LL = 14. 50,p = 0. 000***). Corpus analysis also reveals that we3has witnessed a significant decrease from 6. 40 pttw in 2001 to 1. 08 pttw in 2020( LL = 32. 82,p =0. 000***). It is suggested that Chinese scholars’ stance-taking strategies of self-reference are increasingly in conformity to that of the disciplinary community,however,they tend to lower their authorial visibility while engaging the readers.