The paper titled "Writer-author presence and responsibility in attribution and averral: A model for the analysis of academic discourse" by Habib Abdesslem focuses on the interplay of writer-author presence and responsibility within academic discourse, specifically through the lenses of attribution and averral. The study examines how these elements are employed to maintain a balance between the author’s input and the acknowledgment of sources, proposing a new model to analyze these dynamics.
The purpose of the study is to rehabilitate propositional content often sidelined in metadiscourse studies and to restore the role of the reader and analyst in academic discourse. The paper aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of how attribution (assigning content to a source) and averral (the author's own statements) function together in academic writing, with a focus on the research paper genre.
The methodology involves a detailed review of literature on attribution and averral, followed by the deconstruction of Sinclair's dichotomy into more specific categories. The author then proposes a model that operationalizes these categories and offers illustrative analyses of discourse samples from academic papers. The model is grounded in systemic functional linguistics and draws on various linguistic concepts such as T-Unit and Paratext.
Key findings of the study include the identification of specific categories within attribution and averral that help delineate the presence and responsibility of the writer and author in academic discourse. The proposed model also demonstrates how these categories can be used to analyze the flow of discourse across different academic genres. The study highlights the importance of considering both attribution and averral together, rather than separately, to gain a comprehensive understanding of academic writing.
The study concludes by emphasizing the significance of the proposed model for analyzing academic discourse, particularly in understanding the complex interaction between the writer's voice and the attributed sources. It suggests that this model can enhance the analysis of rhetorical patterns and metadiscourse features, offering a more precise tool for discourse analysis. The findings have implications for both researchers and educators in applied linguistics and related fields, as they provide a clearer framework for analyzing and teaching academic writing.