Writer Identity in the Introduction Section of Academic Law Research Articles: Exploring Metadiscourse Strategies

Abstract

Comparisons of individual introductions show that there are linguistic and rhetorical divergences affecting the way in which scholars represent themselves in legal discourse, involving explicit versus non/less-explicit projection of authorial identity by means of self-mentions as well as idiosyncratic features of writing the introduction genre (the latter viewed in terms of Swales’ prototypical rhetorical description of Move analysis). While these divergences result from the incidence of writers’ socio-cultural identities, they nonetheless allow scholars to secure their allegiance to the community discourse practices by negotiating co-operatively the promotion and publication of their academic work in English to the international readers. As a result of the variously configured linguistic/rhetorical contexts, the argument is made for the identity of the genre writers to be a matter of individuality as well as discipline, which accounts for the discursive practices to be linked with “the impact of globalisation on language, as identities are becoming increasingly fluid and negotiable” (Gotti 2006: 45), therefore leading the identity and integrity of the introductory genre to be “a very versatile concept” (Bhatia 2004: 65) in the disciplinary domain.