| With international journals receiving more and more attention worldwide,academic writing has become one of the criteria for measuring a scholar’s academic achievement.Hyland(2005: 2)defines academic discourse as “the way that an individual collaborates and competes with others to create knowledge,to educate neophytes,to reveal learning and define academic allegiance”.During the development of academic discourse research,authorial voice has gradually received widespread attention in the field of academic writing and researches on engagement system have become a trend in academic writing.All texts contain multiple voices since the choice of words and phrases by the author of a text is influenced by the states of previous usage;therefore,the utterance chosen by the author is not always an expression of personal thought,but contains a dynamic process of communicating with the views of previous authors.The various voices presented in the text dialogue communicate and argue with each other,and the engagement system is the means by which the author regulates the relationship between the various voices through attitudes of negation,endorsement,and acknowledgement,etc.Theoretically,the relative objectivity of academic papers dictates that engagement resources do not apply to this type of writing,but engagement resources not only demonstrate the subjectivity of writing,but also serve as a means of persuasive argumentation.Yet previous studies have rarely analyzed academic papers as engagement resources,even though the discussion section of academic papers is relatively rich in engagement resources due to its nature of explaining and arguing research findings.In practice,however,the discussion section,an important part of journal papers,is primarily used to highlight and explain research findings and is considered one of the most difficult parts to write(Swales,1990).Therefore,it is important to analyze the distribution of engagement resources in the discussion section of research articles and their evolution over time to promote academic writing in international journals.In view of this,this study attempts to analyze the rhetorical strategies of writing the discussion section by applying the engagement system from the systemic functional linguistic appraisal theory to journal articles in the discipline of applied linguistics.The present paper is a corpus-based study that explores the use and distribution of engagement resources in discussion part from 90 international linguistic journal(Language Learning,Modern Language Journal,System)papers over the past four decades through a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses,and explores the patterns of their evolution over time,with a view to providing input for the writing and teaching of discussion sections in research articles.In this study,three small corpora were constructed,and ten journal papers were selected from the three earliest and longest established academic journals in applied linguistics,Language Learning,Modern Language Journal and System in the year of1977,1997 and 2017(90 research articles totally),and their discussion sections were extracted for engagement resource analysis.This paper uses the discussion sections of these 90 research articles in applied linguistics as the research corpus which is analyzed and annotated in terms of monogloss,heterogloss,dialogic contraction and dialogic expansion to output quantitative data through the software UAM Corpus Tool.The evolution of engagement resources like deny,counter,endorse,entertain,acknowledge,and distance etc.is revealed over the past forty years by longitudinally comparing their use frequency and distribution in 1977,1997 and 2017.The essence of engagement is the process of communication and negotiation between the author’s voice and the various voices within the text.Therefore,this paper argues that the writer of a paper has the most basic influence on the use of engagement resources in the writing process.The results of the study showed that although all types of engagement were used in the discussion sections of the selected journal papers,there were significant differences in their frequency of distribution.In general,researchers prefer heterogloss resources to monogloss resources,and dialogic expansion resources to dialogic contraction resources.Among the various types of engagement resources,entertain resources were used most frequently.And from the time dimension,the monogloss resources in the discussion section increased from1997 to 2017,while among the heterogloss resources,the use frequency of dialogic contraction resources showed a decreasing trend throughout the four decades from1977 to 2017.Monogloss and dialogic contraction resources can help authors acquire authoritative voice,but this two show different trends.It is mainly due to the decline in the frequency of negation in dialogic contraction resources.On the contrary,dialogic expansion resources in heterogloss resources show an upward trend,which shows that the prosperous academic communication has opened up a wide dialogue space for scholars.This paper analyzes the characteristics of the distribution of engagement resources in the discussion section of linguistics journal papers through three self-constructed corpora,revealing the diachronic changes in the use of engagement resources to discuss and interpret research findings by researchers in different generations.Theoretically,the study contributes to a deeper understanding of the theory through the practical application of the Engagement System framework,and will also provide some insights into its application in the field of writing.Practically,this study can provide some reference for academic writing and help novice academics to achieve a reasonable use of engagement resources in the process of writing papers so as to improve academic writing. |
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