A Study of Authorial Identity Presence in Academic Articles: the Case of Iranian Scholars

Abstract

This article reports an analysis of the authorial identity presence in the academic papers written by Iranian EFL speakers of Farsi. To this end, a corpus of papers was gathered from different journals and websites. Out of the gathered papers, the ones which were appropriate for the purpose of the study were selected as the sample, i.e. 20 papers written by Iranian EFL speakers of Farsi. To this end, Hyland's (2004) identity categorization was chosen as the model of analysis which considers five types of stance for representing identity, namely, hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mention markers. The content of the corpus was analyzed for instances of authorial markers Iranian writers utilized to manifest themselves in their works. It is worth mentioning that the Iranians' tendency was toward using attitude markers as a representation of authorial identity in their academic papers while engagement markers were the most salient authorial identity markers.