Gender- and authority-related writing performance in academic research articles

This paper seeks to further existing knowledge of gender variation and of the role of the professional author status in academic discourse by analysing research articles by male and female authors with different levels of disciplinary authority within the domains of Applied Linguistics, Law and Economics. In this paper we compare the use of interactive resources (transitions, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials, code glosses, cf. Tse / Hyland 2006) and interactional resources (hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers, self-mention, role-identifying verbs, cf. Fløttum / Kinn / Dahl 2006) by male and female students, researchers and tenured professors, with different levels of experience and authority in the field of business studies, legal studies and linguistics. The material used for these analyses will consist of 100 English research articles from CADIS (Bergamo Corpus of Academic Discourse, Gotti 2006), written by authors of both genders of varying professional standing.