Authorship, place and voice in research: A transitivity analysis of selected African and Western journals

Abstract

The concept of voice has become crucial within academic discourse, where texts constitute sites for enacting identity. In spite of the recognition that expressing authorial voice in writing constitutes a salient feature of academic writing, various studies have pointed out that there appears to be a fair amount of trepidation when it comes to the expression of authorial voice in academic texts, especially so for L2 writers. The argument has been that L2 writers are likely to suppress authorial voice in writing. This argument identifies the L2 status as the underlying cause of the lack of voice in writing. This study examines the relationship between the expression of authorial voice and the cultural location of the journals in which articles are published. It examines authorial voice in the methodology sections of research articles published in Western and African journals. Methodology sections extracted from 60 journal articles from two broad disciplines – Arts and Social Sciences constituted the corpus for the study. Using Halliday’s transitivity framework, the study revealed that within the methodology section, there is a general tendency to diminish authorial voice and that this is reflected in the nature of first-person pronoun usage and in the distribution of the transitivity patterns across the corpus. The study suggests that the cultural location of journals does play a subtle role in the expression of authorial voice and presence in the methodology sections of RAs. There are no deep divergences between the two categories.