The use of genitive citations in academic writing

Publication date: Available online 26 November 2019Source: LinguaAuthor(s): Hongyan Zhao, Hongwei ZhanAbstractCitation, an indispensable feature of academic English writing, is often regarded as an indication of the degree of sophistication in academic writing. Building on previous studies that have shown the importance of integral citation in academic writing, this study investigates one of the subcategories of integral citation: “genitive citation” (e.g., Smith's study, where ’s denotes a possessive relationship: the study is in Smith's possession, so Smith is the possessor, study is the possessee). Based on a corpus of 82 articles collected from the discipline of applied linguistics, with 41 from six leading international journals written by experts and 41 from the MICUSP linguistics sub-corpus written by college students, this study renders a cognitive semantic analysis of (a) the possessee nominals in genitive constructions and (b) the evaluative functions of genitive citations. Based on the specificity of cue validity, possessee nominals are classified into three types: 1) research-as-a-whole; 2) ideological; and 3) methodological. The analysis yields the following results. First, genitive citations are commonly used by both experts and students, with the use of s-genitive citations significantly outnumbering that of the of-genitives. Second, expert writers prefer possessee nominals with specific meanings while student writers tend to use words with less specifici...
Source: Lingua - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research