Author positioning and audience addressivity by means of 'we' in Greek academic discourse
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 19374078
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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10.1075/pbns.239.18vla
- Book title
- Constructing Collectivity : 'We' across languages and contexts
- Publisher
- John Benjamins
- ISBN
- 9789027256447
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- February
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This is a book chapter published in the edited collection Constructing Collectivity: ‘We’ across Languages and Contexts by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This chapter reports on a study of first person plural reference in a corpus of 15 journal articles by Greek-speaking authors. The aims of this data-driven investigation are to provide a fine-grained nuanced account of ‘we’ referential mappings; to explore the ways in which linguists construct their position and their relationship with the audience/ academic community and to address the issue of referential indeterminacy, operationalizing ambiguity as a separate yet relational category.
In previous studies less attention has been paid to providing a detailed account of the linguistic encodings of ‘we’ and their pragmatic functions. The present study shifts attention to the rhetorical practices employed, foregrounding the interplay between the referential possibilities of ‘we’, their pragmatic functions and context of publication. The analytical procedure followed is qualitative, comprising in-depth close text analysis; this is complemented by quantitative methods such as frequency counts. This study is part of a larger comparative study of person reference in the Greek-speaking and the English-speaking academic communities of linguists.
This study unravels the referential possibilities of plural person reference in the writing practices of Greek-speaking linguists. The focus of attention has been on the disciplinary and cultural proclivities observed, as these are situated in the Greek geolinguistic context. A co-text and context sensitive taxonomy has been proposed, based on the semantic references of ‘we’. Three main categories were identified: referential, indefinite and ambiguous. The quantitative results indicate that Greek-speaking linguists show a degree of explicit audience addressivity by means of ‘we’. Ambiguous pronominal references contribute to the construction of the readers’ involvement and agreement during the process of claim-making.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -