On 20-22 June 2022, Mădălina Chitez, Claudia Doroholschi and Loredana Bercuci attended the SIG 12 Biennial Conference 2022 #right2write organized by Umeå University, Department of Language Studies, LITUM in Sweden. They presented a paper entitled Stance and voice: a corpus-based cross-disciplinary study of student theses in English and Romanian.
Abstract:
Stance and voice have been two of the most debated concepts in applied linguistics. It has been suggested that novice writers need to master them in order to express their positioning towards their and previous research and to convey a sense of ownership of their texts, but the terms themselves have been variously defined, and voice has been regarded as a “marker of individuality and as an ideological expression of Western cultural hegemony” (Guinda & Hyland, 2012, p.1). In this study, we use Hyland’s model (2008), which sees voice as cultural rather than personal, and determined by social, cultural and disciplinary communities. We look at a corpus of L1 and L2 writing in different disciplines and analyze how voice and stance are expressed across disciplines and languages.
Our corpus consists of 68 B.A. and 28 M.A. theses written by students at 10 Romanian universities, in four disciplines (Philology, Economics, Computer Science, and Political Science), in Romanian and English. It is part of the ROGER corpus, created at the West University of Timisoara in 2017-2020. Using Hyland’s model (2008), corpus linguistics methods are employed to identify linguistic markers related to stance and voice (hedges, boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions). We therefore expect to draw conclusions on the extent to which Anglo-American ways of expressing stance and voice influence those in Romanian L1 writing in specific disciplines. Interpretations are made on the specifics of Romanian and English writing cultures (Chitez & Kruse 2012) that could support data evaluation.
Presentation excerpts and images from the conference:
