A Diachronic Corpus-based Study Of Chinese Scholars’ Academic Voice

With China’s rise as an emerging scientific publication giant,it has surged to became the second largest producer of scientific publications only to the United States in the world.Research papers published by Chinese scholars have received much attention from linguistic perspectives,among which,academic voice is one of the hottest.However,the previous studies have almost exclusively focused on the synchronic description,with only a handful of researchers discussed the diachronic change.Considering academic writing is constantly affected by the changing socio-contextual factors,it is necessary to explore to what extent the academic voice has changed over time.The current research aims to track the evolvement of Chinese scholars’ academic voice in the field of Materials Science,based on a corpus of 114 research articles published in three world-leading journals:Nature,Science and Advanced Materials,yielding a total of 225,809 words.The self-built analytical framework was founded on the theory of linguistic polyphony(Fl(?)ttum,Dahl,&Kinn,2006)and Engagement system(Martin&White,2005).Through detailed annotation and thorough analysis,the major findings of this thesis are summarized below:Firstly,from the overall distribution of academic voice,the most obvious finding has been the divergent directions of two main sub-categories over time,with a significant increase in Voice Type features and a slight decrease in Voice Interaction resources.This reveals that Chinese scholars in Materials Science are increasingly demonstrating multivoices in their texts and intending to downplay the interactional positions.Secondly,from the perspective of Voice Type,it appears that the knowledge construction practices of Chinese scholars are going through certain changes in today’s fiercely competitive academic world.Both Self-manifestation and Other-manifestation registered a substantial rise.The former suggests that tightly structured procedures of nature sciences(at least in Materials Science)have gradually allowed for obviously authorial presence and increased deployment of attitude markers.The latter might be attributed to the global explosion of academic publication and the easy access to previous works.The emergence of Other-manifestation has contributed to the collaborative construction of knowledge.Moreover,the sharp rise of Non-integral reference also demonstrates a movement towards "suppressing human agency in knowledge-making"(Hyland&Jiang,2017b,p.19).Thirdly,as for the distribution of Voice Interaction,both its subcategories have shown mild falls since 2000,which contributes to the overall decline of interactional resources.The decrease of Entertain indicates the development and maturation of the Materials Science in China and the rise of Proclaim shows increased confidence when Chinese scholars negotiate with their potential readers.Meanwhile,influenced by traditional Chinese culture,such as Confucius thought of modesty and settling differences harmoniously,scientists intend to attribute neutral and positive stance to the cited proposition,which proves to be an effective way to maintain harmonious academic relationships.This might also account for the increase of Endorse and Attribute resources and the decrease of Disclaim.This thesis provides a referential significance for the study of academic voice from both theoretical and pedagogical perspectives.Theoretically,it provides a new perspective and a comprehensive analytical framework for exploring the academic persuasion and interpersonal meanings in academic discourse.Pedagogically,the study helps scholars aware the dynamic nature of academic voice,and that they should adjust their voice strategies in response to the changing social contexts.