Personal and impersonal authorial references: A contrastive study of English and Italian Linguistics research articles

A cross-cultural approach is taken to analyse Linguistics research articles in English and Italian in terms of 1) the use of exclusive first-person subject pronouns in English and first-person inflected verbs in Italian, and 2) the passive voice in both languages and si constructions in Italian. The aim is to determine whether personal and impersonal authorial references as realised by these features are susceptible to variation across academic writing cultures. The results indicate differences in the frequency of use of personal and impersonal authorial references across discourse functions. This variation seems to be due to the adoption of differing interpersonal strategies, subjectivity or objectivity, within the two academic discourse communities, and the dissimilar incidence of particular discourse functions and sub-functions, which ultimately influence the rate of occurrence of personal and impersonal authorial references.