tv.um.es

A long-held misconception in academic writing has been to consider this discourse as lacking authorial presence. However, in recent decades, researchers have shown that writers use a number of linguistic strategies to manifest themselves in their writing (MurDueñas and Šinkūnienė 2016). Among the different strategies employed, the use of firstperson pronouns is the most explicit and has received considerable attention (Hyland 2003; Pho 2012). For instance, Tang and John (1999) have shown that the study of these pronouns constitutes a fertile ground for the exploration of author identity. In their analysis of student essay writings, they identified six writer identity roles and placed them along a continuum of increasing authorial power from author as representative, through author as guide, as architect, as recounter, to author as opinion holder and as originator. This study draws on Tang and John’s taxonomy (1999) to explore whether their framework is suitable for the exploration of identity roles in research article introductions from two medical subdisciplines: Paediatrics and Neurology. In addition, we wanted to determine if there was any variation between these two subfields. For this purpose, we used a corpus of 60 research article introductions taken from six different journals: three for Paediatrics and three for Neurology. The introductions were first analysed for moves and steps according to a slightly modified version of Swales’ Create-a-Research-Space model (1990, 2004). Then, the different first-person pronouns were identified with the software AntConc 3.5.8 (Anthony 2019) and Tang and John’s taxonomy (1999) was used to analyse the different identity roles in relation to the move-step analysis. The results obtained indicate that overall Tang and John’s taxonomy (1999) is useful since all the roles, with the exception of author as guide, were present in the two subfields. However, the model can be further adapted to better account for the different identity roles present in the research article introductions from the two subcorpora. Thus, role 4 in their model (the author as the recounter of the research process) can be divided into two subcategories depending on whether the authors present their study descriptively or purposively. It was also useful to distinguish between three different types of stance in role 6 (the author as originator): factual, tentative and predictive stance. The results also showed that the frequency of self-reference was similar in the two subdisciplines. The pronoun ‘we’ was the most frequent manifestation of self-reference and was predominantly used in Move 3 to express the aims, the hypothesis and/or the description of the study. The most remarkable difference was found for the originator role. In Neurology it was most frequently used in Move 1 to present the authors’ previous research, whereas in Paediatrics it was used in Move 2 to establish the niche. The results of this study can be used for pedagogical purposes in medical English writing courses.