Exploring the construction of academic authorial presence within diverse disciplinary and cultural contexts
Vol.18,No.2(2025)
Discourse and Interaction
This study explores how academic authorial presence is constructed across disciplines and cultural contexts, focusing on differences between Arab Academic English Authors (AAEAs) and Academic English Authors (AEAs). Despite previous studies examining authorial roles and self-representation in academic writing, there still is a gap in comparisons between AAEAs and AEAs. This study investigates the authorial roles assumed by AAEAs and AEAs and how these roles intertwine to construct authorial presence. A taxonomy of authorial representation developed by Tang and John (1999) was employed, with further additions of new authorial roles due to the nature of the genre of research articles (RAs). Thus, authorial roles were analyzed in terms of their functional distribution in order to determine how they shape authorial presence. The analysis showed that AEAs had a higher authorial presence than AAEAs across disciplines, with political science exhibiting the most authoritative presence, followed by law and journalism. There was a difference in authorial presence based on cultural background, disciplinary norms, and the argumentative nature of the RA genre, with roles such as recounter of procedures and originator being more prevalent, while claimers and asserters were less prevalent. This study sheds light on the complex interrelationship between culture, discipline, and conventions of academic writing. In this way, we gain a deeper understanding of how authors establish authority and credibility in various academic contexts.
Authorial presence; Academic writing; Disciplinary conventions; Cultural influences; Arab academic English authors; Academic English authors
Ghada AlGhamdi
King Saud University
Ghada AlGhamdi is Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She specializes in discourse analysis, text linguistics and pragmatics. Her main research fields of interest include metadiscourse, systemic functional linguistics, translation studies, and corpus-based discourse analysis. Her current research explores authorial presence, stance, and evaluation across cultures and disciplines, with a particular focus on linguistic and translational dimensions of academic discourse using corpus-based and CAQDAS-assisted approaches.
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