The construction of academic identity in English and Italian university lectures

It is generally acknowledged that academic lectures represent the principal genre of instruction, a crucial means to convey to students the knowledge base of a discipline (Flowerdew 1994; Thompson 1994; Young 1994; Flowerdew/Miller 1997). However, recent research shows that university lectures are more than a genre of knowledge dissemination. They are value-laden discourses in which lecturers not only transfer information to the audience, but they also express their stance towards the topic explained or discussed (Fortanet-Gómez 2004a; Biber 2006) by persuading the audience about the validity of their claims, and at the same time by contributing to the construction of a voice for authorial positioning in the scientific community. Lecturers’ voice or persona (Cherry 1988) is constructed by means of different linguistic devices (e.g. the use of first person pronouns) which help lecturers project an impression of themselves and of how they stand in relation to their knowledge claims, their community, and their students (Benwell/Stokoe 2002; Fortanet-Gómez 2004b; Walsh 2004, 2010; Biber 2006; Crawford Camiciottoli 2007; Salvi 2012). This paper presents the preliminary results of a contrastive analysis of the encodings of identity in university lectures in English and Italian. Using corpus-based methods, the present study attempts to compare the quantitative and qualitative use of first person pronouns used by lecturers to project an authorial identity, which occur in the specific context of English and Italian lectures in the field of economics. Quantitative-qualitative evidence from the corpora in each language is analysed and discussed with special attention for cross-linguistic (dis-) similarities in terms of ‘language systems’ and overall cultural orientation.