earticle

영어

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)