Search

This article investigates the use of finite reporting clauses with that-clause complementation (e.g. I will suggest that…) as devices for the expression of stance in academic texts (Hyland and Tse 2005; Charles 2006). These constructions are compared to their functional equivalents in Italian, i.e. reporting clauses with che (‘that’) complementiser. The comparison is carried out using a corpus-based approach, involving the analysis of a parallel corpus of Political Science papers in English and their translations into Italian, as well as a comparable corpus of articles originally written in Italian within the same discipline. Thanks to their ability to convey evaluative meanings, reporting clauses are analysed as structures that may provide insights into the epistemological negotiations taking place in the encounter of different research traditions through the practice of translation.

A cross-cultural approach is taken to analyse Linguistics research articles in English and Italian in terms of 1) the use of exclusive first-person subject pronouns in English and first-person inflected verbs in Italian, and 2) the passive voice in both languages and si constructions in Italian. The aim is to determine whether personal and impersonal authorial references as realised by these features are susceptible to variation across academic writing cultures. The results indicate differences in the frequency of use of personal and impersonal authorial references across discourse functions. This variation seems to be due to the adoption of differing interpersonal strategies, subjectivity or objectivity, within the two academic discourse communities, and the dissimilar incidence of particular discourse functions and sub-functions, which ultimately influence the rate of occurrence of personal and impersonal authorial references.