“This is perplexing because…”: Examining the impact of gender and geo-academic location on expressions of confusion in research articles

Abstract

Linguistic expressions of confusion (e.g., perplexing, puzzling, confusing) are important lexico-grammatical resources for academic authors to construct knowledge, enhance persuasion, and promote their research. Drawing on a frame-semantic approach, this paper examined whether the deployment of such expressions differed between male and female academics and between authors based in the Core countries (i.e., Anglophone countries, Western and North European countries), which represent the locus of dominance, power and resource in scholarly publishing, and their counterparts affiliated with the Periphery ones (i.e., the remaining countries). The analyses of 640 research articles sampled from 4 disciplines and semi-structured interviews with 16 disciplinary experts revealed multiple gender- and location-based differences in authors’ use of linguistic expressions of confusion for scientific communication. These observed differences can be attributed to the female and Periphery-based academics’ underrepresentation in the disciplinary community as well as the epistemological positioning and academic literacies that they developed in their particular contexts.