不同写作主体写作特征分析

This study proposes an integrated framework that considers letter-pair frequencies/combinations along with the lexical features of documents as a means to identifying the authorship of short texts posted anonymously on social media. Taking a quantitative morpho-lexical approach, this study tests the hypothesis that letter information, or mapping, can identify unique stylistic features. As such, stable word combinations and morphological patterns can be used successfully for authorship detection in relation to very short texts. This method offers significant potential in the fight against online hate speech, which is often posted anonymously and where authorship is difficult to identify. The data analyzed is from a corpus of 12,240 tweets derived from 87 Twitter accounts. A self-organizing map (SOM) model was used to classify input patterns in the tweets that shared common features. Tweets grouped in a particular class displayed features that suggested they were written by a particular author. The results indicate that the accuracy of classification according to the proposed system was around 76%. Up to 22% of this accuracy was lost, however, when only distinctive words were used and 26% was lost when the classification procedure was based solely on letter combinations and morphological patterns. The integration of letter-pairs and morphological patterns had the advantage of improving accuracy when determining the author of a given tweet. This indicates that the integration of different linguistic variables into an integrated system leads to better performance in classifying very short texts. It is also clear that the use of a self-organizing map (SOM) led to better clustering performance because of its capacity to integrate two different linguistic levels for each author profile.

… of a disputed piece, but also from the perspective of forensic linguistics and plagiarism. … contaminate the stability of the authorial fingerprint. The stylometric study of the Chard Reports on …

The increase in popularity of the Internet media, like emails, blogs/internet forum and websites have been identified as the ideal communication platform for people and one such medium is Instant Messaging (IM) which has gained prominence recently with rise of the Internet. Instant messaging is a type of online chat that offers real-time text transmission over the Internet. The Global Web Index report was conducted across 32 markets involving 170,000 internet users. The study shows that 52 per cent of Indian instant messaging users are on WhatsApp, while 42 per cent use Facebook Messenger, 37 per cent use Skype, We Chat has a 26 per cent share in the market and Viber with 18 per cent market share is in the fifth spot IM is a set of communication technologies used for text-based communication between two or more participants over the Internet or other types of networks instantly [1].

cases of violations of the Law on Electronic Information and Transaction (UU ITE) which are dominated by cases related to hacking and fake documents. An interesting fact is that a number of cases were found with evidence that points to the falsification of texts and someone's authorship. Proofing authorship dispute cases in Indonesia has not reached an analysis of authorship, because of the difficulty of identifying personal identity in electronic texts, especially in short texts with limited characters and words. This study examines Indonesian text set to investigate and describe linguistic profiles based on N-gram analysis and style characteristics. The data source in this study is Corpora of electronic text sets from 50 unique authors, including 8 authors and evidence from criminal cases, which are limited to 2000 characters or 500 words. All texts are personal texts that are collected from volunteers and case documents that are permitted to be accessed. Data analysis was carried out by determining and calculating the n-grams, both on the character-level and word-level, and performing stylometric features that the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) library extracts. The results of the data analysis show that lexically, the character-level n-gram analysis, as the smallest n-unit, shows an important element of authorship attribution, such as the use of alphabetic and non-alphabetic characters, capitalization, and punctuation. Diction is a significant factor to identify the author's profile and distinguish between one author and another. The results of using the small text set are able to demonstrate authorship attribution to identify authors, with the various stylistic features, resulting in a classification accuracy of between 92% and 98.5%.

Abstract In this article, we propose an innovative and robust approach to stylometric analysis without annotation and leveraging lexical and sub-lexical information. In particular, we propose to leverage the phonological information of tones and rimes in Mandarin Chinese automatically extracted from unannotated texts. The texts from different authors were represented by tones, tone motifs, and word length motifs as well as rimes and rime motifs. Support vector machines and random forests were used to establish the text classification model for authorship attribution. From the results of the experiments, we conclude that the combination of bigrams of rimes, word-final rimes, and segment-final rimes can discriminate the texts from different authors effectively when using random forests to establish the classification model. This robust approach can in principle be applied to other languages with established phonological inventory of onset and rimes.

… signature, can be strong authorial evidence of personal writing style. This is more prominent … , punctuation, and part of speech, can capture an author's writing style at the sentence level. …

The majority of approaches to author profiling and author identification focus mainly on lexical features, i.e., on the content of a text. We argue that syntactic and discourse features play a significantly more prominent role than they were given in the past. We show that they achieve state-of-the-art performance in author and gender identification on a literary corpus while keeping the feature set small: the used feature set is composed of only 188 features and still outperforms the winner of the PAN 2014 shared task on author verification in the literary genre.

Recent Court decisions in the United States call for the empirical testing of language-based author identification techniques. This article shows the results of such testing. The tested hypotheses include: syntactic analysis, syntactically-classified punctuation, sentential complexity, vocabulary richness, readability, content analysis, spelling errors, punctuation errors, word form errors, and grammatical errors. These hypotheses are tested on a set of documents written by four women who are similar in age, educational level, and dialectal background: two of the women are Euro-American, and two are Afro-American. Each hypothesis is tested separately to determine its ability to differentiate documents from different authors and cluster documents from each author. Hypotheses which quantify linguistic features are tested statistically using the chi-square statistic. Discrimination error rates are calculated. Only two hypotheses successfully differentiate and cluster documents: syntactic analysis and syntactically-classified punctuation.

Authorial identity construction is one of many professional rhetorical strategies employed by authors in academic review genres. Authors usually create a persona to represent themselves, their seniority in the field, and the community to which they belong. The author’s visibility is made possible through several rhetorical devices. Perhaps the most remarkable way of such authorial identity construction in the review article genre is self-mentions. The aims of this research are (1) to find out what types of self-mention are frequently used in review articles, (2) to determine the frequency of use and distribution of self-mentions in the review articles, and (3) to investigate the rhetorical function of self-mentions in the different analytical sections of the review articles. The data, drawn from a randomly selected corpus of thirty-two review articles, were analysed using WordSmith Tools Version 6. The findings indicated that first-person plural pronouns were more frequently used than singular pronouns in the whole corpus except in the two review texts. It was also observed that the frequency of occurrence for the exclusive and inclusive pronouns was very close to each other. Most importantly, the inclusive pronouns were used not only as a politeness strategy to appreciate the readers and keep the writers’ claims balanced but also as a persuasive tool to seek the readers’ agreement in the evaluation of research developments. This study revealed that authors construct various professional personas as a rhetorical strategy to carve their authorial identity and credibility in the review article genre. The findings of this study have pedagogical implications in the field of academic writing in applied linguistics as well as other disciplines.

Abstract Author and author gender identification are two major tasks in the context of profiling of authors of written material. Author identification (or, more precisely, “authorship attribution”) copes with the assignment of the author, who is to be chosen from a given list of author names, to a piece of written material. Gender identification deals with the prediction of the gender of the author (male vs. female). Both tasks are very relevant to a number of applications, including, e.g., plagiarism and deception detection, document authenticity verification, and blackmailing. State of the art in both fields tends to rely mainly upon lexical and token (sequence) distribution features. But this means to neglect numerous linguistic studies that clearly indicate the high relevance of “deep linguistic”, i.e., syntactic and discourse, features to the characterization of the style of an author or a group of authors. Our work on author and gender identification confirms this relevance. We show with two different genres, namely blog posts and literary writings, that the use of deep linguistic features is very effective. It leads to  > 78% (in the case of blog posts) and  > 91% (in the case of literary writings) of accuracy in author identification and  > 89% (blog posts) and  > 90% (literary writings) of accuracy in gender identification.

This study revealed the distributional features of literature citation and writer identity in linguistic academic discourse, and further explored how writer identity is constructed through literature citation. Based on Petrić’s citation typology and Ivanič’s writer identity framework, the study investigated various types of citations and identities in thirty journal articles published in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes from 2017 to 2021. The results showed that there are a total of 1637 citation instances, among which the dominant type is attribution citation (36.59 %). Besides, the study revealed that 80.45 % of the total citations construct discoursal self only and 19.55 % reveal both discoursal self and authorial self. In terms of discoursal self, writers present themselves as a member of academic community, a contributor to a field of knowledge, a knowledgeable and professional scholar, and a reliable and credible writer. As for authorial self, they would like to position themselves to be a writer with authority and an evaluator. It is expected that the current study can help novice writers use citations strategically and establish their desired identity accordingly.

The article compares character-level, word-level, and rhythm features for the authorship verification of literary texts of the 19th-21st centuries. Text corpora contains fragments of novels, each fragment has a size of about 50 000 characters. There are 40 fragments for each author. 20 authors who wrote in English, Russian, French, and 8 Spanish-language authors are considered.The authors of this paper use existing algorithms for calculation of low-level features, popular in the computer linguistics, and rhythm features, common for the literary texts. Low-level features include n-grams of words, frequencies of letters and punctuation marks, average word and sentence lengths, etc. Rhythm features are based on lexico-grammatical figures: anaphora, epiphora, symploce, aposiopesis, epanalepsis, anadiplosis, diacope, epizeuxis, chiasmus, polysyndeton, repetitive exclamatory and interrogative sentences. These features include the frequency of occurrence of particular rhythm figures per 100 sentences, the number of unique words in the aspects of rhythm, the percentage of nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs in the aspects of rhythm. Authorship verification is considered as a binary classification problem: whether the text belongs to a particular author or not. AdaBoost and a neural network with an LSTM layer are considered as classification algorithms. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of rhythm features in verification of particular authors, and superiority of feature types combinations over single feature types on average. The best value for precision, recall, and F-measure for the AdaBoost classifier exceeds 90% when all three types of features are combined.

… Indirectly we can termed it as habit of author reflected by its writing style [… author identification task, but there are limitation for similarity detection, and provide summary of some features. …

… In adopting the practices and discourses of a community we … seen as a defining feature of expository writing as it embodies the … ‘‘author-evacuated’’ prose, and many textbooks and style …

… lead to an identification. Forensic linguists working within this … be due to the social characteristics of the author, or, in SFL, … to show distinctiveness of authorial style compared to a …

… Based on a view of writing as a social and communicative … , metadiscourse focuses our attention on the ways writers project … metadiscourse in this study represented less stark contrasts …

The aim of this comparative study is to investigate the deployment of interactional metadiscourse features in two different academic genres. For this purpose, a small, specialized corpus of 48 research articles and book reviews from seven different disciplines were collected. The conclusion sections of the texts written by non-native speakers of English were investigated to find out how interactional metadiscourse features were used. Drawing on previous metadiscourse frameworks, hedges, boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions and engagement markers were identified in both sub-corpora. The results indicated significant differences across the groups on how writers constructed their authorial stance with interactional metadiscourse markers. Findings revealed that by using a rich number and variety of attitude markers, book reviewers were more evaluative in their conclusions. On the contrary, higher use of hedges in research articles allowed the authors sound more cautious in their commitment to the propositions. This study offers a detailed account of interactional metadiscourse in these two genres and illustrates how interpersonal function of language is accomplished for particular purposes in different academic texts.

The study represents a contrastive text-linguistic research* on metadiscourse evidenced in academic articles written in English by English and Norwegian native speakers, and tends to reveal and depict certain similarities and differences which exist between them. The research is based on the theoretical assumption that metadiscourse varies in academic writings across different cultural communities and relies on the traditional writing habits and rhetoric preferences within each writing culture. Moreover, the rhetoric habits from one´s own writing culture are easily transferred to writing activities when done in a foreign language, often causing some kind of misunderstanding between the writer and his reader, thus diminishing the validity of propositional content conveyed through the discourse. Bearing this assumption in mind, the comparison undertaken in this research has been expressed in terms of similarities/differences between metadiscoursal items and groups identified in the two corpora and the results of the comparison have been discussed in the same vein. Besides cultural-specific differences, the present study also includes some metadiscoursal findings concerning the discipline-specific differences and tendencies which occur in academic articles regardless of the author´s language and cultural background. Due to comparatively small research corpus, the presented results should be considered rather tentative: they are primarily aimed at pointing to some directions for further research. However, the author hopes that the method and procedure used in this research could be applied to similar studies in which academic discourses written by English native speakers are compared to those which are written by non- native speakers of English.

Metadiscourse in the argument presented here is based on a view of communication as social engagement and in academic contexts reveals the ways writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their understandings of their material and their audience. In this paper I explore how advanced second language writers deploy these resources in a corpus of 240 doctoral and masters dissertations totalling four million words. The analysis suggests that writers use language to offer a credible representation of themselves and their work in different fields, and thus how metadiscourse can be seen as a means of uncovering something of the rhetorical and social distinctiveness of disciplinary communities.

Taking the non-integrative approach to metadiscourse (Adel 2006; 2008), this paper carries out a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic analysis of text- and participant-oriented metadiscourse in two rhetorically forceful research article sections (Introductions and Discussions). Results show that, across cultures, the average frequencies of the two types of metadiscourse are relatively similar in the two article sections. Findings also show that the micro-level discourse functions of these metadiscourse types seem to concentrate in specific information moves in these sections, suggestive of shared uniform conventions for academic writing across cultures and languages. The exploration of metadiscourse further reveals several culture- and language-specific traits regarding preferred lexicogrammatical realisations of metadiscourse units, different preferences for personal/impersonal metadiscourse types as well as different textual developments for constructing arguments.

… of 44% in contrast to that of female writers that is 3% only. Despite the findings indicate certain tendencies among male and female writers in terms of using metadiscourse features, I do …

… a wide range of metadiscourse features across the three … in academic writing as they are in spoken registers, in contrast … student writers, as they move through the ranks of the university…

Abstract Writers interact with readers using explicit signals of textual organization (e.g., firstly; however) and stance (e.g., possibly, surprisingly), known as metadiscourse markers (MDMs). Most metadiscourse studies, however, focus on academic writing exclusively, with minimal efforts comparing MDMs usage across communicative contexts. The present study examines English-as-Foreign-Language (EFL) learners’ use of MDMs in academic and colloquial writing. Each participant produced two texts on the same topic: a personal email to a close friend (colloquial) and an academic report to school principals (academic). The corpus of 704 texts were coded using Hyland’s metadiscourse model (2005). Trained EFL teachers scored texts for overall writing quality. The study first presented a distributional map of MDMs used in the EFL academic and colloquial writing corpora. Then, multi-level models revealed both similarities and differences in the use of MDM subtypes to serve distinct communicative purposes (e.g., more code glosses in academic writing; more boosters and engagement markers in colloquial writing). Finally, the use of MDMs was analyzed in relation to overall writing quality within and across communicative contexts. The results highlighted the strengths and weaknesses in EFL learners’ use of MDMs and informed the design of pedagogical approach attuned to the pragmatic functions of MDMs.

… the study is to compare and contrast 90 abstracts of … writing in English (L2) deviates from writing in Turkish (L1) and becomes closer to the target language in terms of the metadiscourse …

… relevant to academic writing, ‘‘since writers differ considerably … far they establish an authorial presence in their writing’’ (p. 26). … In contrast, interpersonal metadiscourse is mainly used to …

… This study investigates the use of interactional metadiscourse within a third-year Human Resources course at a large North American university. Analysing final individual writing …

Metadiscourse – the ways in which writers and speakers interact through their use of language with readers and listeners – is a widely used term in current discourse analysis, …

… on metadiscourse marking in academic writing. Therefore, this review aims to focus on the status of metadiscourse use in academic writing … It aims to clarify how writers from languages …

Abstract This paper investigates developmental patterns of metadiscourse use in Chinese students’ EAP writing in an English medium university, in comparison with English majors’ EFL writing in mainstream state universities and L1 student writing in UK universities. Taking a longitudinal and cross-contextual perspective, the study explores corpora of L1 and L2 student writing gathered from three sources: EAP essays written by Chinese undergraduate students at an English Medium Instruction (EMI) university; argumentative essays written by English majors in the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL); and academic essays of English L1 students from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus. Hyland’s (2005a) model of metadiscourse was adopted to identify interactive and interactional devices in each corpus, and results were compared between different levels as well as across the corpora to reveal developmental features. Findings show marked differences in metadiscourse use between Chinese EMI students’ EAP essays and English major students’ EFL essays in mainstream state universities, whereas a similar pattern of use occurred in EAP essays and English L1 student academic essays. Significant changes were also found between different year levels in two L2 essay corpora. The findings suggest that metadiscourse use in L2 writing had developmental trajectories distinctive to different institutional contexts, with EAP instruction in the EMI institution having mixed effects on Chinese students’ awareness and use of metadiscourse in essay writing.

Theme and thematic progression in learner English has been studied extensively. This paper reviews the literature of Theme and thematic progression in learner English. Related articles appearing in the international journals from 1994 to 2013 are gathered and analyzed so that the following four questions can be answered: (i) How can Theme and thematic progression improve coherence in learner English output? (ii) How do English learners deviate from English native speakers in Theme and thematic progression in their output? (iii) What factors contribute to English learners’ deviation in use of Theme and thematic progression? (iv) How can instruction in Theme and thematic progression improve English learners’ use of Theme and thematic progression? Observations are also provided. This review not only provides a synthesis of the related literature in Theme and thematic progression, but also points to issues that could be further addressed in this research area.

Discourse competence is crucial in constructing a unified text (Canale 1983). However, while the importance of discourse competence in written discourse has been emphasized, studies of effects of specific features of discourse competence on the quality of a text have been neglected (Purpura 2008). Moreover, little research has used a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach to analyze cohesion and coherence features in writing discourse. Therefore, this study employed an SFL approach to examine how cohesion and coherence features were used in 45 non-native academic written responses across proficiency levels. The study aimed to provide an insight into learners’ second language discourse competence development. The analyses from four multinomial logistic regressions suggested that comparative conjunctions, accurate use of referential expressions, lexical cohesion, and theme-rheme patterns provided useful insights into learner discourse competence progression. The study has implications for teaching academic writing and for developing a rating scale for a writing assessment.

This paper offers a detailed study of Theme as point of departure in English and Spanish academic texts. A corpus of around 45,000 words is examined from different perspectives to compare the realizations, functions and interplays of the point of departure in these two languages. Examples reveal crosslinguistic contrasts in terms of (a) the preferred realizations of thematic elements, (b) the strategies to maintain participant identity and present new participants and (c) the resources used to construe texture. We will see that whereas English favours thematic non-pronominal noun groups, Spanish combines these with other realizations. Additionally, the different syntactic characteristics of each language have a reflection on different ways of signalling semantic continuity and on textual development in general. The findings presented in this paper should make a significant contribution to the existing literature on Theme, as well as on academic writing and contrastive typological research.

This study addresses L1 transfer in Chinese EFL learners’ use of thematic progression in English argumentative writing. Through a series of statistical analyses of the data collected from argumentative essays written by Chinese and American university students, the study finds that the overuse of thematic progression patterns in English writing is under the influence of Chinese EFL learners’ native language both linguistically and conceptually. Tests of potential effects of intra-group homogeneity and intra-L1-group congruity provide convincing evidence for the identification of L1 transfer. In addition, the study further explores the underlying causes of L1 transfer both at linguistic and conceptual levels.

… crosslinguistic studies in accounting for the appearance of marked themes in the written English discourse of Chinese subjects… a more distant theme or the head of a more distant rheme. …

The purpose of this study was to estimate the artificial intelligence (AI) detection potential using stylometric analysis in Study 1 and examine the AI detection abilities of humans in Study 2. In Study 1, we compared 100 human-written public comments with 350 texts generated by seven large language models (LLMs) (ChatGPT [GPT-4o and o1], Claude3.5, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Llama3.1, and Perplexity) using multidimensional scaling (MDS) to visualize differences by focusing on three stylometric features (phrase patterns, part-of-speech bigrams, and unigrams of function words). In general, each stylometric feature can distinguish between LLM-generated and human-written texts. In particular, three integrated stylometric features achieved perfect discrimination on MDS dimensions. Interestingly, only Llama3.1 exhibited distinct characteristics compared with the other six LLMs. The random forest classifier also achieved 99.8% accuracy. In Study 2, we performed an online survey to assess the Japanese participants’ AI detection abilities by presenting LLM-generated and human-written texts, as used in Study 1. 403 participants tackled “AI or Human” judgment task and estimated their own confidence, revealing that overall human AI-detection ability was limited. Moreover, in our materials, more advanced ChatGPT(o1), plausibly reflecting relatively greater fluency and polish, tends to mislead the participants to believe “human-written” texts compared with ChatGPT(GPT-4o) and improves their confidence for their own judgments. Furthermore, an additional comment from the survey suggested that participants primarily relied on superficial impressions based on phraseology, expression, the ends of words, conjunctions, and punctuation marks in judgments. These findings have important implications for various scenarios, including public policy, education, and marketing, where the rapid and reliable detection of AI-generated content is increasing.

As artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly permeates educational landscapes, its impact on academic writing has become a subject of intense scrutiny. This research delved into the nuanced dimensions of authorship and voice in academic writing, specifically focusing on the application of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In this study, the research team compared and contrasted an essay written by one second-year English student for a course on English literature with a similar essay produced by ChatGPT. The current research also, tried to clarify whether artificial intelligence can satisfy the formal requirements of academic writing and maintain the distinctive voice inherent in human-authored content. The examination hinges on parameters such as assertiveness, self-identification, and authorial presence. Additionally, the researchers shed light on the challenges inherent in producing AI-generated academic text. While ChatGPT presented an ability to generate contextually relevant content, the results highlighted its need for support in guaranteeing factual accuracy and capturing the complex aspects of authorship that are common in human writing. Notably, when compared to human-generated text, the AI-generated text was deficient in terms of specificity, depth, and accurate source referencing. While AI has potential as an additional tool for academic writing, this study’s findings indicated that its current capabilities—particularly in producing academic text are limited, and remain constrained. This study emphasizes upon the imperative for continued refinement and augmentation of AI models to bridge the existing gaps in achieving a more seamless integration into the academic writing landscape.

Large language models have become popular over a short period of time because they can generate text that resembles human writing across various domains and tasks. The popularity and breadth of use also put this technology in the position to fundamentally reshape how written language is perceived and evaluated. It is also the case that spoken language has long played a role in maintaining power and hegemony in society, especially through ideas of social identity and “correct” forms of language. But as human communication becomes even more reliant on text and writing, it is important to understand how these processes might shift and who is more likely to see their writing styles reflected back at them through modern AI. We therefore ask the following question: who does generative AI write like? To answer this, we compare writing style features in over 150,000 college admissions essays submitted to a large public university system and an engineering program at an elite private university with a corpus of over 25,000 essays generated with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to the same writing prompts. We find that human-authored essays exhibit more variability across various individual writing style features (e.g., verb usage) than AI-generated essays. Overall, we find that the AI-generated essays are most similar to essays authored by students who are males with higher levels of social privilege. These findings demonstrate critical misalignments between human and AI authorship characteristics, which may affect the evaluation of writing and calls for research on control strategies to improve alignment.

… Each subplot presents essays grouped by their true authorship (AI or human) and how the … AI-generated content is more rigid and formulaic in style. The Flesch-Kincaid grade level of …

… stylometry to investigate whether the creative writing styles of humans and large language models … 70b can be distinguished through quantitative analysis. A balanced dataset of short …

… Beyond scholarly assistance, AI is now involved in creation itself. Large language models can be used to create essays, news articles, poems and fictional stories with increasing …

… metadiscourse features than the Chinese sub-corpus. Implications of this study are … for both English and Chinese academic writing, including the teaching of English writing as …

ABSTRACT This study investigates how Chinese scholars in Applied Linguistics construct different authorial stances in their English and Chinese research articles (RAs) by using interactional metadiscourse comprising boosters, hedges, and self-mentions. A specially designed corpus of 22 Chinese and 22 English RAs written by the same group of Chinese scholars was compiled and examined for metadiscourse forms and functions. We found that (a) while the Chinese scholars employed similar frequencies of boosters in both their Chinese and English RAs, they used significantly more hedges in their English RAs than in their Chinese RAs; (b) while they used more boosters than hedges in their Chinese RAs, a reverse pattern was found in their English RAs; (c) they used significantly more self-mentions, particularly first-person pronouns in their English RAs, than in their Chinese RAs. These findings indicate that the same Chinese scholars have displayed different epistemic stances and authorial identities in their Chinese-medium and English-medium publications.

… -and-contrast functions. Based on the … -contrast between English and Chinese RAs. It is found that, in the knowledge-making practice of comparison-and-contrast, English and Chinese …

… of academic English writing for Chinese ESL (English as a … the use of metadiscourse in writing of different languages and … metadiscourse in academic writing, focusing on English and …

Abstract As a significant indicator of College students’ ability in academic English communication, academic papers, especially their condensed abstracts require various writing techniques among which the use of grammatical metaphors (GMs) is typical. To improve the English academic writing level of Chinese postgraduate students, it is significant to compare their use of GMs with that in expert research articles. On the basis of Halliday’s reclassification of GMs, this study aims to compare the characteristics of GMs in abstracts of MA theses and expert research articles (RAs). It is found that there is universal use of nearly all GM types in both groups. The two groups are similar in that they share the top five most frequently used GMs, and there are no significant differences in the use of more than half of the GM types. However, the overall GM frequency of expert RAs is significantly higher than that of MA theses. Significant differences are also found in the use of six GM types. Furthermore, some correlations between certain GM types found in expert RAs are missing in MA theses. Reasons for these differences may include the limited understanding of GM, the underdeveloped cognitive ability, the genre differences, and the first language differences. Based on these findings, implications for teaching and learning are discussed.

Metadiscourse provides a framework for understanding interaction in discourse by examining the linguistic resources that the writers employ to organize their text and involve their readers. The studies in metadiscourse use in Chinese academic writing reveal that Chinese scholars maintain an impersonal style and adopt an authoritative stance. We investigated the changes in interaction in Chinese academic writing during the past 40 years by exploring metadiscourse use in 90 Chinese research articles from the top five Chinese academic journals in Applied Linguistics in 1980, 2000, and 2020. The analysis shows significant decreases in metadiscourse use during this period in both interactive and interactional features, and changes in linguistic choices of metadiscourse demonstrate a shift to guidance and persuasion with more logical arguments, objective evidence, and relevant literature, possibly suggesting that Chinese scholars now use metadiscourse mainly to clarify and inform, presenting knowledge as codified facts, privileged rather than negotiated or constructed. We also find that metadiscourse use significantly increased in 2000 before its decrease in 2020, unveiling Chinese scholars’ earlier efforts to guide and involve.

Metadiscourse represents a producer’s intention to guide a receiver’s interpretation of the textual meanings. It is a highly dynamic topic in discourse analysis and language education. Related studies provide a way to understand language in use, and contribute to a better understanding about the relationship between the seemingly unconscious language choices and the social contexts. Based-on a corpus of 150 research articles (RAs) written by English L1 scholars, Chinese ESL scholars and Chinese L1 scholars, this study compared their interactive and interactional metadiscourse strategies cross-linguistically and cross-culturally. Quantitative results manifest significantly higher metadiscursive frequencies in English-medium RAs than in Chinese-medium RAs, and significantly higher metadiscursive frequencies in RAs written by British-American scholars than by Chinese scholars. Also, Chinese ESL writers reveal L1-based transfer of discourse conceptualization. Apart from providing with cultural explanations, this study then particularly discusses cognitive implications of culture-specific and language-specific metadiscourse variations by addressing the connections between metacognition and metadiscourse. With the proposed Model of Correlated Metadiscourse and Metacognition, it argues that metadiscourse is the linguistic reflection of metacognition and that metacognition exerts mediation and monitoring over cognitive objects partly by the means of metadiscourse.

… study of metadiscourse in the academic writing of two groups of … China through the medium of English; 2) Native speakers of Mandarin studying in the UK through the medium of English. …

… The interpersonal functions of metadiscourse are investigated in … In contrast, English writers are more familiar with the way of … in academic writing by native English writers and Chinese …

… In sharp contrast, Chinese academic writers, due to the influence of collectivism in … Hence, as discussed above, we maintain that Chinese academic writers prefer to employ tend in the …

Although English has become a lingua franca for academic publication, a growing number of multilingual scholars prefer to publish in both English and their first languages. This corpus-based study investigates how Chinese scholars in applied linguistics deploy interactive metadiscourse in their published Chinese and L2 English research articles, compared with those of L1 English writers. Both Chinese character(zì)-based and word(cí)-based units were used to segment and quantify the Chinese corpus, yielding two contrasting sets of results in the cross-linguistic comparisons. To ensure a conceptually equivalent comparison, we opted for word-based results, showing that the L1 Chinese corpus evidenced more frequent interactive metadiscoursal features than both the L1 and L2 English corpora. The latter two corpora, by contrast, revealed similar patterns of distribution. The divergences and convergences between Chinese and English corpora indicate linguacultural influences on interactive metadiscourse and reveal the methodological constraints on analysis of similar linguistic features.

English for foreign language (EFL) novice writer-researchers are faced with an increasing pressure for international publication as a prerequisite for sustainable career development in academia. The use of metadiscourse, as a key indicator for their discourse competence, has been a subject of research for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and/or English for Specific Purposes (ESP) scholars. This study investigates metadiscourse features of research articles’ (RA) results and discussion (R&D) sections written by Chinese PhD students and their writer identities reflected through metadiscourse choice. A corpus was built, consisting of a subcorpus of R&D of unpublished research articles (RAs) written by Chinese PhD students (CNWs) and one of the same part-genre by English-speaking expert writers (EEWs). Metadiscourse used by the two groups were identified based on Hyland’s interpersonal model of metadiscourse. Quantitative analyses on the frequency and variety of metadiscourse markers found a significant difference not only in interactional metadiscourse but also in some subcategories of interactive and interactional metadiscourse, indicating that CNWs attach more importance to organisation of ideas than to the persuasiveness of arguments. A questionnaire survey was conducted to explore the influence of the CNWs’ perception of RA writing on their metadiscourse choice. It revealed that knowledge of generic conventions and metadiscourse functions, awareness of the writer–reader relationship, and confidence in language competence may influence metadiscourse choice. The paper concludes with the view that the CNWs generally view themselves as a recounter and reporter of their research, remaining conservative when presenting an authoritative voice and a confident identity as a knowledge creator.

This study adopts the revised interpersonal model of metadiscourse to discover whether and to what extent Chinese authors employ a varying amount of Interactional Metadiscourse (IM) in the past decade in English abstracts of economics Research Articles (RAs). The data was drawn from a prestigious economics journal in China to compose a corpus of 289 abstracts. The analysis indicates that Chinese authors harmonize with English counterparts by capitalizing on more hedges, while the amount of boosters unexpectedly maintains at a high level over time, both of which can be attributed to the interaction of Chinese deep-seated cultural leanings and Anglo-American cultural preferences. Consistent with our prediction, attitude markers exhibit no significant difference along the years given the initial parallel with English counterparts. However, there are significant differences of self-mentions in the past decade regardless of English rhetorical conventions, which may be attributed to economical influences in China. With regards to engagement features, they remain relatively underused with no marked difference within the period resulting from the genre-specific factor which confines their use.

… new syntactic feature might improve authorship disambiguation. The data presented in Figure 6ad use the same controlled sample described previously, and show the distribution of …

Nominalization in undergraduate writing Nominalizations, or nouns derived from verbs or adjectives through suffixes, are a pervasive characteristic feature of written academic discourse. To better understand the nature of nominalization in L2 student writing and its relation to assessment in first-year writing (FYW) contexts, we report findings of a comparative corpus-based analysis of nominalization use in university student papers. Data consist of high-rated (A graded) and low-rated (C graded) L2 undergraduate research papers from multiple sections of an FYW course for international and multilingual students. Nominalizations were examined in terms of frequencies, unique types, abstract/concrete and human/non-human categories, nominal stance types, and modification types. Results reveal no statistically significant differences in the examined classifications. However, the small effect sizes for certain categories point to subtle differences between the two groups, which together might have affected the instructors’ evaluations of text quality. We conclude with suggestions for incorporating nominalization instruction in English for Academic Purposes writing courses.

… between the active and passive voice in academic Englishes. … Syntactic annotation (parsing) of the ICE corpora allowed us … Also common as active subjects are -ing nominalizations, like …

Authorial voice in medical journal abstracts has been widely studied; however, there is a clear research gap concerning how Hungarian authors place themselves in their English-language abstracts. This study examines the differences in the authorial voice used by Hungarian authors publishing in a local journal and international authors publishing in widely read journals. One hundred abstracts on COVID-19 from three journals were extracted and searched for personal pronouns, possessive determiners, noun phrases indicating implicit authorial presence and passive voice. The results suggest a similar frequency of the personal pronoun we across the corpora, but a more frequent use of the possessive determiner our by Hungarian authors, whereas first-person singular pronouns are almost non-existent. While noun phrase usage shows the most variability in the Hungarian abstracts, the passive voice ratio is between those found in the two international corpora. Pedagogical implications are drawn, especially concerning the observation of published abstracts as models for L2 academic writing versus the growing tendency to use artificial intelligence to generate abstracts.

Empirical studies of register variation have established the existence of functional correspondence between situation/context and language use. However, previous conceptualizations of register cannot adequately account for empirical findings which have revealed (i) situational and linguistic variation among texts within registers and (ii) texts that do not belong to a register. We propose an alternative conceptualization in which registers are culturally-recognized categories, as opposed to scientifically-defined categories. This allows us to describe registers for their typical characteristics as well as the variation among texts within register categories. It also allows us to account for the functional correspondence of texts that exist outside of register categories.

This chapter explores language reports (LRs) across varied registers through a transdisciplinary lens, drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), stylistics, and metadiscourse. While LRs have been studied extensively within disciplines, this study highlights how combining frameworks provides deeper insight into the forms, functions, and frequencies of quoting and reporting. Using a corpus from academic, legal, media, and literary texts, this chapter identifies linguistic signals and register-specific patterns in LR usage. The findings show how registerial variation shapes LR strategies and how a transdisciplinary approach allows for a more nuanced, context-sensitive understanding of discourse presentation across speech, thought, and evidential practices.

This study explores the genre structure and register realization of medical research abstracts through the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Based on a corpus of 60 abstracts from six major medical disciplines published between 2017 and 2024, the study analyzes rhetorical staging and linguistic choices to uncover how meaning is constructed in this highly codified academic genre. The findings reveal substantial standardization across the corpus, with most of the abstracts following a simplified Introduction–Methods–Results–Discussion (IMRaD) structure and displaying standard features such as technical field realizations, nominalizations, low-modality expressions, and impersonal constructions. However, subtle disciplinary variations are noted in which Oncology abstracts emphasize contextual background more, while Pulmonology and Cardiology focus more on methods and results, highlighting the influence of field-specific epistemological priorities. These results affirm prior research in genre and discourse analysis and suggest that medical abstract writing requires structural conformity and rhetorical flexibility. Pedagogically, the study underscores the value of SFL-informed instruction in medical English writing courses, especially for non-native English-speaking scholars. Integrating genre- and register-based training could enhance abstract-writing competence and increase the international publication success of emerging researchers in contexts such as Vietnam.

… This context recognizes language variation due to code, as in authorial differences, as well … variation, we may hope to disentangle the omnipresent effects of register and genre variation …

Merja Kytö is Professor of English Language at Uppsala University. In this article, she provides a detailed accounting of the role of register in research on the historical development of language. Her substantial body of work has focused on both the historical development of specific registers, as well as how historical change has been mediated by register. Her research has encompassed a range of time periods (from Early Modern English to the 19th century) and registers (for example, depositions, Salem witchcraft records, and dialogues). Her many edited collections have brought historical linguists together into comprehensive and rigorous volumes, including the Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics (Kytö & Pahta 2016, Cambridge University Press), English in Transition: Corpus-Based Studies in Linguistic Variation and Genre Styles (Rissanen, Kytö, & Heikkonen 1997, De Gruyter), and Developments in English: Expanding Electronic Evidence (Taavitsainen, Kytö, Claridge, & Smith 2014, Cambridge University Press). She has been a key contributor to the development of principled historical corpora, such as the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts project, which represents a range of registers from Old and Middle English to Early Modern English. Merja Kytö has long been a leader in demonstrating how systematic attention to register can result in rich profiles of historical development, and in addressing the inherent challenges involved in utilizing historical documents for linguistic research.

Abstract This paper investigates the contribution of author/idiolect vs. register/type-of-text – as the most salient factors influencing the final shape of a text – towards explaining the variation observed in Czech texts. Since it is almost impossible to explore the effect of these factors on authentic data, we used elicited letters collected in a fully crossed experimental design (representative sample of 200 authors × four elicitation scenarios serving as a proxy to register variation). The variation encompassed by the elicited texts is analyzed through the lens of a general-purpose multi-dimensional model of Czech. Using triangulation via three established statistical methods and one devised for the purpose of this study, we find that register matters a great deal, explaining 1.5 times as much variation overall as idiolect. This should be taken into account when designing research in sociolinguistics or variation studies in general.

Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen is a leading scholar in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Together with William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson, he developed Rhetorical Structure Theory, a discourse analytical framework which he has continued to expand and extend using insights from the architecture of SFL. His contributions to SFL are in various areas, such as functional language typology, theoretical modeling of the dimensions of language and comprehensive paradigmatic description of English lexicogrammatical systems. In this interview, he discusses various topics on register from the SFL perspective, including the definition of register and the location of register in the SFL architecture. The interview also relates to Halliday’s and Martin’s conceptions of register, Matthiessen’s long-term project of registerial cartography, and the applications of register in various domains. The discussion is expected to contribute to the debates on register and its applications.

… discourse which has been conducted within Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL). It does … By placing genre beyond register variation the former can be seen as cutting across register …

Active-passive voice alternation is central to scientific writing, addressed both in journal style guidelines — often simplistically — and in academic writing instruction, which highlights its rhetorical complexity. Despite existing linguistic descriptions of the passive’s discourse functions, more applied research is needed on how novice writers use it in developing academic writing. This study examines how medical students employ the passive in research article introductions, using systemic functional linguistics theory to analyse variation according to process type, Agent role and rhetorical move. Results show that in Introduction sections, passives are mostly Agent-less relational processes with categorising or literature-review functions and that ergativity — rather than transitivity — better explains passive use in scientific English. They also show how writers align with discourse conventions while simultaneously displaying individual stylistic variation.

… this register through the use of the subjective first-person pronoun I from a Systemic Functional Linguistics (… This is done through the analysis of: (1) the variation of I in evaluative journal …