Abstract:
In recent decades, the traditional perception of academic writing as an objective and impersonal endeavour solely devoted to conveying factual information has given way to a view that sees it as an interactional enterprise laden with personal preferences and cultural influences. With this shift in the understanding of the nature of academic writing, authorial voice and stance have become a major focus for research in applied linguistics. This paper investigates the extent to which Turkish doctoral students of literary studies differ from their counterparts in British universities in terms of the use of the self-mention markers in their doctoral dissertations. To this end, having its spark in Hyland's idea of interactional metadiscourse, this study compares the self-mention markers and their collocates in the Turkish and UK corpora comprising 100 doctoral dissertations, using a corpus-assisted lexical analysis method. The results show that there is a statistically significant difference between the doctoral students at Turkish and British universities in the use of the self-mention markers. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the surrounding context of those markers (i.e. collocational patterns) seems to diverge to a great extent when the corpora output is compared. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the possible causes of this difference and suggestions for further studies.