Variability in the manifestation of authorship in academic abstracts: Comparison of humanitarian and natural science discourses

The article deals with the problem of the intradiscursive variability of the speech genre of the abstract. The article aims to identify the variability of the manifestation of the author's principle in the verbal genre of abstract functioning in academic discourse. 38 Russian-language abstracts to linguistic academic articles published in the journal “Genres of Speech” in 2023 and 34 Russian-language abstracts to biological academic articles published in the “Journal of General Biology” in 2022 were selected as the base of the study. The main research methods were general scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, comparison, juxtaposition, content analysis, statistical analysis), as well as methods of complex linguistic research – lexico-semantic, component, grammatical, discursive, stylistic, linguistic and pragmatic analyses. It was revealed that the pronouns “we” and “our” (in 13 % of linguistic and 21 % of biological annotations) and the self-designation “author” (in 11 % of linguistic and 3 % of biological abstracts) are used in abstracts as explicit markers of the authorʼs presence. Biologists are more actively using indirect designation through pronouns to emphasize personal contribution to solving a scientific problem and present results reflecting new knowledge. There are no differences in the use of implicit authorization tools (passive and impersonal constructions) in the abstracts belonging to the humanitarian and natural science discourse. To express an evaluative attitude towards the components of an epistemic situation, qualitative adjectives are used in the abstracts of both scientific directions, but in linguistic abstracts the set of adjectives is much richer. It was found that in the abstracts of natural science discourse the strengthening of evaluation using qualitative adverbs is more common (50 %) than in linguistic abstracts (29 %), as well as the weakening of evaluation – 32 % and 10 %, respectively. This indicates the desire of the linguistic authors to be more accurate and selective in expressing the strengthening or weakening of the assessment and, if possible, to avoid such speech strategies. Ii is concluded that the variability of the authorʼs presence in the verbal genre of abstract, functioning in academic discourse, is due to differences in research approaches, scientific tradition and the dissimilarity of the worldview of scientists.

abstract, speech genre, secondary text, academic discourse, variability, authorship, authorization, evaluation, epistemic situation