On the conventionalisation and loss of pragmatic function of the passive in Late Modern English scientific discourse

Seoane, Elena

doi:10.1075/jhp.14.1.03seo

Cited by 63 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…First person pronouns, often considered the defining marker of informality, account for much of the increase in informal features with 45% overall growth during the period. This phenomenon has also been noted by Seone (2013) who has traced a decline in the frequency of be-passives with respect to transitive actives between 1905 and 1990 in hard science articles both in British and in American texts. A reduction in the use of the passive in her data suggests an increase in the need for first person pronouns.…”

Section: How Is Formality Changing?supporting

confidence: 60%

Is academic writing becoming more informal?

Hyland

Jiang

2017

English for Specific Purposes

154

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There is a general, though largely unexamined, assumption among those interested in such things that writing in many domains has become less formal in recent years (e.g. Adel, 2008;Foster, 2005;Fairclough, 2001) . Observers have noticed a gradual shift away from standard detached and impersonal styles of writing to ones that allow more personal comment, narration and stylistic variation, so that Mair, for example, notes "a trend towards the informal and the colloquial in written communication" (1998: 153) and Leedham (2015) found greater informality in undergraduate essays.This trend towards informality might be seen as part of a contemporary zeitgeist which blurs overt hierarchies and values interpersonal engagement or, alternatively, be regarded as another form of insidious persuasion, what Fairclough (2001: 52) calls "synthetic personalization". It is possible, however, that the informality which has invaded a large range of written and spoken domains once characterized by formality (journalism, business correspondence, administrative documents, etc.) has also spread to academic writing. Indeed, it has been fashionable among applied linguists in recent years to search for evidence of greater interactivity in academic prose and identify the ways that writers craft an inclusive relationship with their readers (e.g. Hyland, 2004).In this paper we explore this issue and investigate whether academic writing is becoming less formal and, if so, in what ways and in what disciplines. We first attempt to characterize the notion of 'informality' and how it is understood by academic discourse analysts and those who advise authors on academic style. Needless to say, while we know it when we see it, we find 'informality' to be a slippery concept, difficult to pin down with a clear definition. It is typically either defined in contrast with formality, or in terms of lists of language features which are thought to comprise 'informal elements', such as using imperatives, employing "I" or starting sentences with "but". Focusing on published research articles as the most important genre of academic writing, we then undertake a comparative study of three corpora composed of papers in four fields drawn from three distinct time periods, examining the frequencies of key 'informal elements'. What is informality?The first place to start is with a definition or characterization of the term, but this is not altogether straightforward. Informality is generally hetero-defined, the Latin prefix meaning "not, opposite of, without" (Online Etymology Dictionary, 2010) and demarcated as the absence of formality. It therefore presupposes the existence of formality and a recognized set of practices built on a structure, authority or system. Thus the Cobuild dictionary defines formal speech as "very correct and serious rather than relaxed and friendly" while in pragmatics, formality is associated with 'negative politeness' and the use of distancing behaviour to respect the other's face and their wish not to be imposed on (Brown & Levinson, 1987)...

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Section: How Is Formality Changing?supporting

confidence: 60%

Is academic writing becoming more informal?

Hyland

Jiang

2017

English for Specific Purposes

154

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“…This uniformity is perhaps reflective of the need for scientific writing to be as precise as possible. This may help to explain the preference for the basic passive over other passive forms in the corpus since the addition of other auxiliary verbs is either impossible (20) The pervasiveness of the bare passive in the corpus also deserves mention, given how it is often bypassed in studies [7,24]. The data in Table 2 show that almost one in ten clauses in the corpus contained a bare passive.…”

Section: Passive Formsmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…The first concerns the stability of present-day norms. Seoane [7], for instance, points to a "pronounced decline" in the use of the passive voice; the data from two time periods (1961 vs. 1991-92) show a fall of between 10.3% and 24.0% in the relative proportion of passive clauses [8]. Despite the decrease, the proportion of passive clauses in the 1991-92 corpora remains somewhat high, accounting for about half of all clauses (41.9-56.7%).…”

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confidence: 99%

The passive voice in scientific writing. The current norm in science journals

Alvin¹

2014

JCOM

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In contrast to past consensus, many authors now feel that the passive voice compromises the quality of scientific writing. However, studies involving scientific articles are rare. Using a corpus of 60 scientific research articles from six journals, this study examined the proportion of passives used, and the contexts and forms in which they occurred. The results revealed that about 30% of all clauses were passive clauses. The canonical form was most pervasive, followed by the bare passive; together, they constituted more than a quarter of all clauses analyzed. Passives were typically used in main clauses, followed by relative and adverbial clauses. Roughly 29% of all passives were located in the methodology section. Based on the results, the proportion of passives in scientific writing may stabilize at about 30%. It is unlikely to dramatically drop any further since the trend suggests that passives are still widely used in the methodology section. KEYWORDS: Scholarly publishing, science writing 1 Context and objectivesA cursory glance at the numerous writing guides available, both on the Internet and in printed form, reveals a clear shift in consensus regarding the use of the passive voice in scientific writing. While the prevalent use of the passive voice was characteristic of scientific discourse in the major part of the 20th century [1,2], the situation today is rather different. Many writing guides favor the use of the active voice for reasons of clarity and conciseness [3]. In their writing guide for scientific English, Day and Sakaduski [4] state this preference even more directly -"the passive voice should be avoided".Yet, as Ding [1] has shown in his work involving corpora from the 18th century to the end of the 19th century, early scientific discourse actually favored the active voice. The move towards the passive voice in the 20th century arose as a result of the increasing demands for scientific discourse to be objective, in the sense that the writing should ideally represent the world "in terms of objects, things, and materials" [1] rather than humans. As a consequence, scientific writing took on a decidedly object-or thing-oriented character [5,6]. With the preference for the active voice in present-day scientific writing, we appear to have come full circle.Indications from an informal survey among postgraduates at a Singaporean university, however, suggest that not many may be aware of this current preference. In fact, 90 of JCOM 13(01)(2014)A03

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“…Thus Atkinson(1999), for example, has tracked changes in papers published in The Philosophical Transactions between1675 to 1975, finding a relentless growth in 'informational' features until the latter date, a change which Atkinson describes as a move from a less 'author-centred' rhetoric to a highly abstract and 'object-centred one'. The genre has also seen a decline in the frequency of be-passives compared with transitive actives through the 20 th century (Seone, 2013) and a movement towards more compressed, phrasal expressions over elaborated, clausal expressions which allow for faster, more efficient processing by expert readers ( Biber & Grey, 2016). Academic genres, however, appear to change only slowly so that Hundt and Mair (1999: 221) suggest that they reside at the more conservative end of "a cline of openness to innovation ranging from 'agile' to 'uptight' genres".…”

Section: Stance In Academic Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Change of Attitude? A Diachronic Study of Stance

Hyland

Jiang

2016

Written Communication

146

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Stance, or the writer's expression of personal attitudes and assessments of the status of knowledge in a text, has been a topic of interest to researchers of written communication for the last three decades. Notwithstanding this interest, and a more general curiosity concerning the gradual evolution of genres, very little is known of how stance in academic writing has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred uniformly across disciplines. Drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from the top five journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we seek to determine whether authorial projection has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years. Our paper presents, and attempt to account for, some surprising variations and an overall decline in explicit stance during this period.Successful research writers construct texts by taking a novel point of view towards the issues they discuss while anticipating readers' imagined reactions to those views. This intersubjective positioning is encompassed by the term stance and, in various guises, has been a topic of interest to researchers of written communication and applied linguists for the last three decades. Recognising that academic writing is less objective and "author evacuated" than Geertz (1988) and others once supposed, analysts have sought to identify the ways that writers use language to acknowledge and construct social relations as they negotiate agreement of their interpretations of data with readers.Despite prolonged and widespread curiosity concerning the notion of stance, however, together with an interest in the gradual evolution of research genres more generally, very little is known of how it has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred uniformly across disciplines. In this paper we set out to explore these issues. Drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words 2 taken from the top five journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we seek to determine whether authorial projection has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years. Conceptions of stanceThe ways that writers and speakers express their opinions is an important feature of all interaction and researchers have long been concerned with describing how stance is linguistically marked. A range of terms have been used to conceptualise the idea. Some are umbrella conceptions such as posture (Grabe 1984), attitude (Halliday, 2004), appraisal (Martin, 2000), evaluation (Hunston & Thompson, 2000) and metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005a). Others focus more specifically on the linguistic realisations of judgements, feelings, or viewpoints by looking at intensity (Labov 1984), disjuncts (Quirk et al, 1985), hedges (Hyland, 1998) and modality (Palmer, 1986).Two related ideas have been particularly influential in current conceptions of stance: evidentiality (Chafe, 1986;Chafe and Nichols, 1986) and affect (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1989;Besnier, 1990).Evidentiality refers to the status of the knowledge contained ...

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On the conventionalisation and loss of pragmatic function of the passive in Late Modern English scientific discourse

Cited by 63 publications

References 29 publications

Is academic writing becoming more informal?

Is academic writing becoming more informal?

The passive voice in scientific writing. The current norm in science journals

Change of Attitude? A Diachronic Study of Stance

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