Interactional voice construction in academic research articles across disciplines and part-genres

Abstract

While prior research has examined how interactional voice varies across disciplines or article sections, few studies have explored the intersection of these dimensions, especially in the social sciences, where voice expectations are diverse and often implicit. This study investigates how interactional voice is constructed through metadiscourse markers and interactional lexical bundles across three social science disciplines (applied linguistics, economics, and psychology) and four research article part-genres (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion). Drawing on a corpus of 240 published articles, we quantified the use of hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and directives using the Authorial Voice Analyzer (AVA), and identified high-frequency lexical bundles containing these features. Results show that part-genre exerts a stronger influence on voice construction than discipline, with interaction effects indicating that disciplinary differences vary across part-genres. The Discussion section exhibited the highest frequency of voice markers, while the Methods section showed the lowest. Disciplinary differences were more modest, with psychology articles featuring fewer boosters and more attitude markers than the other disciplines. Lexical bundle analysis further revealed section-specific formulaic patterns of stance. These findings suggest that voice in academic writing is shaped more by local rhetorical purpose than by disciplinary identity. They support pedagogical practices that emphasize both discipline- and genre-sensitive instruction in EAP, specifically through explicit teaching of stance strategies and recurrent lexical bundles.

Publication Title

Journal of English for Academic Purposes

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