Park, Soon-boon. “The Interpersonal Passive in English Research Article Abstracts: It Is Argued That....” Studies on English Language and Literature. 33.3(2007): 175-190. English research article abstracts are supposed to be written briefly and do not allow redundancies. In this limited writing, choices of marked sentences should be carefully made. Nevertheless, marked sentences such as it is argued that are not rare in academic writing. Choice of dummy it in the sentence theme does not contribute to building sentences which relate to one another and to the topic and subtopic in hand. Motivations for choice of the target construction need to be identified. This study investigates the use of anticipatory it-passives in research article abstracts in order to get an insight into the constructions. The data comprise 120 abstracts in the field of applied linguistics by NS and NNS (Korean authors). Results show that for native speakers, the choice of the anticipatory it-passive indicates that the writer really wants to be front in addressing research findings and interpretations which mean a lot to her or his own work, but intentionally remains in the background. A comparison between NS and NNS use in the target pattern shows that there could be a possibility that beginning or inattentive writers might not have awareness of its appropriate use. (University of Ulsan)
목차
Abstract I. Introduction II. The Passive III. Method 3.1 Rhetorical Moves in Research Article Abstracts IV. Results and Discussion 4.1 NS Use of Anticipatory It-passives 4.2 NNS Use of Anticipatory It-passives V. Conclusion Works Cited