A corpus-based study of authorial identity in Indonesian writers’ research articles

Abstract

Academic writing is no longer perceived as a knowledge exchange but an arena where writers communicate their stances and promote their work. Recent studies have revealed that academic discourse is not entirely impersonal. Writers obtain credibility by presenting convincing arguments and confidence in their evaluation to construct a competent scholarly identity. Many studies have shown that the presence of writers is significant to gain membership in academic communities, and the key strategy to achieve it is the use of explicit self-mention, which refers to first-person pronouns and possessive adjectives. However, some research also reveals that writers from non-English speaking countries avoid using self-mention due to the connotations of authority. The present research studies the construction of authorial identity by investigating the use of self-mention markers in the corpus of 106 research articles written in English by Indonesian authors in national scientific journals on marine and fisheries. The results show that Indonesian writers on marine and fisheries have started to recognize the importance of writers’ presence in their texts, indicated by the use of first-person pronouns and possessive adjectives. However, the occurrences of self-mention in the Indonesian corpus to construct writer identity are still lower than English corpus. The writers use self-mention mainly to explain a procedure rather than stating claims/results that expert writers often use to show their unique judgment. The finding suggests that Indonesian authors are more accustomed to the convention in which academic writing is regarded to communicate disciplinary content carrying a representation of the writer.