https://doi.org//10.17651/POLON.44.8

Łukasz Wiraszka

Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków

ORCID: 0000-0002-3653-5926

Reporting previous literature in Polish research articles: a corpus study of cross-disciplinary variation within the soft sciences

1. Introduction

By contextualizing their own research within the existing body of scholarly contributions to a given field of study, authors of academic texts not only secure support for their claims, but also prove their status as members of a particular academic community (Hyland, 1999a, p. 342). In doing so, however, they are expected to observe the discursive norms and conventions that reflect “the values, practices and beliefs” shared by researchers in their academic discipline (Hyland, 2007, p. 98). If arguments presented in published research are to be compelling, they must be embedded in a rhetorical structure that is familiar to and accepted by intended readers. The persuasiveness of academic prose thus ultimately depends on the use of “social and linguistic conventions that colleagues find convincing” rather than on merely providing adequate argument and evidence (Hyland, 1999b, p. 99).

Researchers belonging to different academic communities employ notably different linguistic resources to achieve their rhetorical goals, and citation practices reflect some of “the most striking differences in disciplinary uses of language” (Hyland, 2009, p. 10). Therefore, investigating “[h]ow writers choose to present reported information provides important insights into the context of academic persuasion” (Hyland & Jiang, 2019, p. 81). This is precisely the rationale behind the present study, which, following considerable work by Hyland and others with regard to English, aims to examine the linguistic patterns and features that authors of Polish academic texts draw on when referring to prior research.

The analysis presented in this paper focuses on research articles – the primary genre of written academic communication and the “master narrative of our time” (Montgomery, 1996 qtd. in Swales, 2013, p. 207) – in five disciplines informally classified as “soft sciences”, namely: philosophy, psychology, economics, linguistics, and literary studies. The major aims of the study are: to identify and quantify all citations, understood as passages of text whose function is “the attribution of propositional content to another source” (Hyland, 1999a, p. 341); to explore the ways in which authors present the reported information as well as some of the grammatical features of the references to previous literature; and to identify the most frequent reporting verbs used in the citations. The analysis is expected to indicate areas of cross-disciplinary variation in how authors of Polish research articles refer to others’ work. The concept for this paper was directly influenced by Hyland’s (1999a) study and, essentially, follows the methodology adopted therein, a major difference being that the corpus of articles compiled for the purposes of the present research includes texts representing the soft disciplines only, as Polish scholarly journals in the hard sciences currently publish almost exclusively in English.

2. Literature review

Citation practices in academic prose have been the subject of numerous studies. However, a vast majority of the existing literature on this subject is concerned with research articles written in English. In his classic work on “English in academic and research settings”, Swales (1990, p. 148) introduces a fundamental distinction between two forms of citation: integral vs non-integral, where the first category includes cases with the cited author’s name appearing as a constituent of a sentence, while the latter one covers references with the name placed outside the structure of a sentence, typically in parentheses or square brackets. The researcher also focuses on grammatical aspects of integral citations, differentiating between cases where the name occurs as the subject of a sentence, as the agent of the process expressed by a verb in the passive voice, as a possessive modifier within a noun phrase, and as an element of an adjunct.

In terms of their rhetorical function, Hyland (1998, p. 174) classifies citations as “writer-oriented” hedges, i.e. linguistic devices employed by scholars to limit their responsibility for the assertions they make, thereby protecting them from potential negative consequences should a claim be proved false. Attributing propositional content to another source is thus not only a fundamental means of lending support to one’s own line of argument, but also an effective way of controlling accountability through cautious choice of the linguistic resources used to report previous research.

A considerable body of cross-disciplinary research on citation practices pioneered by Hyland has shown that there are “major differences in the ways writers report others’ work, with results suggesting that writers in different fields draw on very different sets of reporting verbs to refer to their literature” (Hyland, 2009, p. 11). Using a corpus of 80 English research articles in eight academic disciplines, Hyland (1999a, 2009) has demonstrated that while citations in the soft disciplines tend to be based on verbs describing discourse-related activities (e.g. argue, discuss, say, suggest), the reporting verbs most frequently employed in the hard sciences indicate research-related processes (e.g. analyze, discover, observe, show). As the researcher puts it, “[i]t turns out [...] that engineers show, philosophers argue, biologists find and linguists suggest” (Hyland, 2009, p. 11; italics in original). Another finding is a tendency of writers in the soft sciences to use integral citations and place the cited author in the subject position (Hyland, 1999a, p. 352).

Investigating citation behavior in English research articles representative of four disciplines from a diachronic standpoint, Hyland and Jiang (2019) note a significant increase in the number of citations per paper and a decrease in the use of reporting verbs over the last several decades, accompanied by a general tendency to use linguistic resources which enable writers to downplay the role of human agency in citations and focus on the reported research rather than on the scholars who conducted it. This is manifested, among other things, in an increased use of non-integral citation structures, observed for both soft and hard disciplines. Hyland and Jiang’s (2019) study also shows notably frequent use of discourse verbs in the citations identified in applied linguistics articles.

Numerous studies on linguistic aspects of citation aim to propose implications for the teaching of English for Academic Purposes (e.g. Picquard, 1995; Clugston, 2008; Davis, 2013; Luzón, 2015; Kwon et al., 2018). Some of the findings of these studies, however, also indicate certain general citation-related preferences among scholars of different disciplines. For example, in her study of applied linguistics research articles, Picquard (1995) observes a slight preference for integral citations, with the cited author’s name most frequently used as the subject of an active verb, while Clugston (2008) shows a greater preference for non-integral forms in biological disciplines, like physiology and radiology, in comparison with behavioral sciences, although she also notes considerable variation among individual authors in this respect. Much of the EAP research dealing with citation focuses on genres other than the research article, mainly theses (e.g. Thompson, 2005; Charles, 2006) and argumentative essays (e.g. Kamimura, 2014; Kapranov, 2023).

Following the long line of research on academic attribution in English, there is an emerging strand of linguistic work on reporting the existing literature in other languages. Some of the examples, not infrequently cross-linguistic in nature, include: Burada’s (2012) paper on citations in Ph.D. theses written in Romanian, Rowley-Jolivet and Carter-Thomas’s (2014) study of attribution and stance in English and French research articles, Dontcheva-Navratilova’s (2018) contrastive study of citations in linguistics research articles written in English and Czech, Varga and Gradečak-Erdeljić’s (2018) investigation of citation practices in applied linguistics research articles published in Croatian and English, Rui and Wang’s (2019) corpus-based study of reporting verbs in academic Chinese, Matte and Stumpf’s (2022) analysis of reporting verbs used in Portuguese scholarly journals, and Alramadan’s (2023) paper on citation patterns in Arabic research articles compared with those written in English.[1]

Scholarly interest in linguistic aspects of citation in Polish academic prose has been rather limited, without a single study published to date that would be entirely devoted to how Polish authors report previous research. In view of the undeniable role of English as an academic lingua franca, Polish linguists have mostly been concerned with contributing to the vast body of work on EAP, usually comparing the use of citations in texts written in English by Polish authors with those written by native speakers of the language (e.g. Hryniuk, 2016). Apart from some theoretical-didactic work, exemplified by Marzec-Stawiarska (2016), references to the existing literature in Polish texts are the subject of a subsection in Kowalski (2015). However, the analysis presented therein is solely based on papers in linguistics and takes a diachronic and cross-linguistic perspective, comparing Polish texts with those written in English by Polish and Anglo-Saxon authors over a period of 30 years. Mainly focusing on quantitative aspects of citations, Kowalski’s major finding is that the frequency of references to prior research by other scholars may be “a language-related variable”, with the Polish texts in his corpus employing more citations than their English counterparts (Kowalski, 2015, p. 156).

The dearth of research into the ways in which prior literature is reported in Polish academic prose of different disciplines represents a noteworthy gap in what we know about the community-based discursive norms of knowledge construction. Since Polish remains a major language for publishing research among Polish scholars in the soft sciences, a cross-disciplinary study on linguistic aspects of their citation behavior seems to be well-motivated, if only to compare the findings with those available for English.

3. Corpus and method

The corpus compiled for the purposes of the present study included a total of 50 articles, with each of the five disciplines under examination, i.e. psychology, philosophy, economics, linguistics and literary studies, represented by a subcorpus of 10 articles. Two Polish peer-reviewed academic journals were selected for each discipline with a view to assuring cross-disciplinary uniformity of academic quality as gauged by the number of points granted by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Since higher-ranked Polish journals in the fields of psychology and economics publish mainly in English, for each of the five subcorpora a decision was made to include 5 articles from a journal with the rating of 70 points and 5 articles from a journal awarded 40 points at the time the material was gathered. Each batch of 5 texts was selected randomly from among all the research articles published in a given journal in the years 2022–2023. Non-research articles, such as editorials, reviews or memoirs, were rejected.

The articles were downloaded as PDF documents from the online versions of the journals, and their content was extracted and saved in the plain text format, which is suitable for automatic processing with the use of concordancing and text analysis software. The material included in the corpus comprised the main body of each article and its footnotes, i.e. all text excluding: the title, the researcher’s name and personal information, abstract, keywords, reference list, metadata for the paper, as well as any textual content contained in tables and figures or in their captions. The content of the corpus is summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. A summary of the corpus

Most of the journals under examination employ the Harvard referencing system, with in-text references consisting of the author’s name, accompanied by the publication date given in either rounded or squared brackets, the only exception being „Folia Philosophica”, where references have the form of consecutively numbered footnotes listing full publication details for first occurrences and Latinate or shortened citation forms (i.e. the author’s name and the first several words of the title) for repeated citations. In order to retrieve relevant passages of text for analysis, the CasualConc (Imao, 2024) concordancer was used with queries based on the names listed in the bibliographies of the papers, Latinate citation forms (e.g. ibid., op. cit.), typical Polish referencing expressions and abbreviations (e.g. tamże ‘ibid.’, i in. ‘et al.’), as well as some common nouns often employed in Polish academic prose to refer to previously mentioned authors (e.g. autor/autorka ‘authormasc/fem’, badacz/badaczka ‘researchermasc/fem’). Additionally, manual scans were performed of the immediate context of the citations thus found, especially a few lines of text following a citation, in order to identify cases with renewed references that did not include the author’s name or any of the regular citation forms listed above; such cases could be based on structures with implied subjects or the use of an unforeseeable common noun and they seem to be a particularly common occurrence in extended discussions of the same author in the philosophy and literary studies articles.[2] The material retrieved in this way was entered into a spreadsheet for further manual examination.

Since the present study is concerned with reporting the existing scholarly literature, excluded from investigation were numerous references to literary authors whose texts were being analyzed, often with extensive block quotations, in the literary studies subcorpus. Unlike Hyland (1999a), the present study does not reject citations of an author’s own previous work, which are here treated on a par with references to other authors’ research, on account of it being part of the existing literature for a given subject area. In the following sections of this paper, however, like Hyland (1999a), I follow Thompson and Ye’s (1991) convention of using the term “writer” to refer to the person who does the citing and the term “author” to refer to the cited scholar.

The analysis of the corpus material was, for the most part, carried out along the lines delineated in Hyland (1999a). The examples were examined in terms of three basic criteria: the syntactic structure of the citations, the form in which the reported propositions were introduced in the text, and the reporting verb used to describe the cited author’s activity. Accordingly, the citations were first classified as either integral (with the author’s name or another means of referring to the author occurring within the structure of a sentence) or non-integral (with the author’s name placed in brackets) and the grammatical structures employed with the references were identified. Secondly, the examples were grouped into four categories depending on whether the proposition was expressed with the author’s words (either as a short quote or as a block quote) or with the writer’s own words (either as a summary of one source or a generalization over several sources). And finally, if present, the reporting verb was identified and subsumed under one of the three categories of “author acts” distinguished by Thompson and Ye (1991, pp. 369–371) according to the type of activity ascribed to the cited author: verbal expression (discourse acts), mental processes (cognition acts) or research-related procedures (research acts).[3]

4. Findings and discussion

A broad look at the quantitative results proves that there is no uniformity in the citation behavior among the writers in the disciplines under investigation. The figures in Table 2 show that while making references to the existing literature is a crucial element of academic prose for all of the disciplines, with the average number of citations per research article in the whole corpus just below 54, the psychological and philosophical texts turn out to be the most dense in terms of citations, with the average frequencies of 14.84 and 14.53 instances per 1,000 words, respectively. By contrast, the subcorpus of literary studies, with fewer than half as many occurrences per 1,000 words, is characterized by the least frequent reliance on references to previous studies, whereas the middle of the scale is occupied by the research articles in linguistics and economics (ca. 11 instances per 1,000 words). Interestingly, the figure for the subcorpus of linguistics is almost identical to the one obtained by Kowalski (2015) for references to other scholars’ work in Polish linguistics texts published in 2010.

Table 2. Frequency of citation by discipline

Although the writers of Polish articles in philosophy and psychology employ citations with comparably high frequencies, they tend to do so in quite distinct ways as regards the prominence given to the authors of the cited texts. As indicated by the figures in Table 3, an overwhelming majority (ca. 83%) of the citations in the philosophy subcorpus involved the use of a surname or another means of referring to the cited source within a sentence, while most (ca. 73%) of the citations in the psychological texts focused on the reported propositions, rather than on the authors to whom they were being attributed, by placing the names in brackets.

Table 3. Syntactic structures of citations by discipline (in %)

Moreover, in a vast majority of the citations in the philosophical papers (ca. 71%) the cited source functioned as the subject of a verb, as illustrated by the examples in (1), whereas the relatively infrequent integral citations in the psychological texts had the smallest proportion of the subject position of all the five disciplines.

(1)

Davidson nazywa to efektem akordeonu (por. Davidson 1980, s. 53 i n.) [Phil]

‘Davidson calls this the accordion effect (cf. Davidson 1980, p. 53f.)’

Pawłowski zauważa, że wyrażenia wieloznaczne tego typu mogą [...] [Phil]

(Pawłowski 1986, s. 37)

‘Pawłowski notes that ambiguous expressions of this type can [...] (Pawłowski 1986, p. 37)’

Jest on bowiem, jak celnie ujął to Kozák, „filozofem z teologicznym zacięciem” [Phil]

‘That is because, as Kozák aptly put it, “a philosopher with a theological bent”’

There was generally a slight preference for integral citations in the whole corpus (ca. 57%), with economics being the only other discipline beside psychology that favored non-integral citations (ca. 58%). The strongest tendency to place the cited source in the subject position was observed in the literary studies subcorpus, which is also characterized by the least frequent use of the author’s name in the genitive case as a possessive modifier of another noun in an NP. The latter structure was most often employed in the articles in psychology (ca. 19%) and, somewhat less frequently, in the linguistics subcorpus (ca. 17%). This suggests a relatively more important role of theories, models, conceptual frameworks, etc. developed by particular researchers in these two disciplines. The following are examples of citations with the author’s name as a possessive modifier within an NP:

(2)

Kanoniczną propozycją jest model panteoretyczny Bordina (1979; 1994) [Psych]

‘The canonical proposal is Bordin’s pantheoretical model (1979; 1994)’

[...] do założeń psychologii rozwojowej, a dokładnie do teorii cyklu życia Eriksona (1997) [Psych]

[...] ‘to the tenets of developmental psychology, and more specifically to Erikson’s lifecycle theory’

Rzadziej punktem odniesienia jest teoria integracji pojęciowej (blending theory) Gilles’a [Ling]

Fauconniera i Marka Turnera (2002)

‘Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s (2002) conceptual blending theory is less often the point of reference’

Overall, there is a tendency to present the cited source as the subject of a verb across all the disciplines (ca. 66% on average). A clear exception from this pattern was noted in the subcorpus of psychology, where the proportion of the subject role (ca. 47%) is well below the average for the whole corpus. By contrast, the articles in psychology manifest the highest frequency of non-subject structures (ca. 34%), which further confirms the psychology writers’ propensity to focus on the reported propositions rather than the scholars credited for them. The two most frequent non-subject structures in this subcorpus involved expressing the cited source as the agent of a verb in the passive voice (ca. 39% of the cases) and the use of a reporting verb in an impersonal form, either with the ending -to/-no or with the reflexive pronoun się (ca. 46% of the cases). These two non-subject structures occurred at varying ratios in all the subcorpora, and they can be illustrated with the following examples:

(3)

Wiek szkolny jest uznawany przez wielu badaczy za okres krytyczny dla rozwoju przyszłej [Psych]

kariery zawodowej (Vondracek, 2001)

‘School age is considered by many researchers to be a critical period for the development

of a future career (Vondracek, 2001)’

Wśród właściwości tych wymieniane są [...] (McClelland, 1985) [Psych]

‘Among these properties are listed [...] (McClelland, 1985)’

[...] metod wychowawczych, które zostały wyróżnione przez Dominiak-Kochanek (2017) [Psych]

[...] ‘the educational methods that were distinguished by Dominiak-Kochanek (2017)’

[...] są wyjaśniane w literaturze przedmiotu również z wykorzystaniem [...] (Aziewicz 2023) [Econ]

[...] ‘are also explained in the literature with the use of [...] (Aziewicz 2023)’

Wykazano, że dieta wegetariańska zmniejsza poziom [...] (Key i in., 1999; Szeto i in., 2004) [Psych]

‘A vegetarian diet has been shown to reduce the levels of [...] (Key et al., 1999; Szeto et al., 2004)’

W innych badaniach zauważono, iż zgodność małżonków w zakresie poglądów religijnych [Psych]

wyraża się [...] (Curtis, Ellison, 2002; Mahoney, Tarakeshwar, 2005 za: Rydz, 2014)

‘In other studies, the compatibility of spouses in terms of their religious views was found

to be expressed by [...] (Curtis, Ellison, 2002; Mahoney, Tarakeshwar, 2005 qtd. in Rydz, 2014)’

Za najbardziej charakterystyczne uznano zmienne [...] (Howard, Sheth 1969, s. 480) [Econ]

‘The variables [...] were considered to be the most characteristic (Howard, Sheth 1969, p. 480)’

Wśród atrybutów wrażeń słuchowych wymienia się [...] (Jorasz 1998: 112–114) [Ling]

‘[...] are listed among the attributes of auditory sensations (Jorasz 1998: 112–114)’

The remaining 15% of the non-subject structures in the psychology subcorpus can be subsumed under Hyland’s (1999a, p. 347) heading of “adjunct agent structures” or “adjuncts of reporting” (Tadros, 1985 qtd. in Swales, 1990, p. 148). These are expressions akin to the English according to..., which can be argued to give more prominence to the author than either the passive or impersonal structures. They were the most frequent occurrence in the linguistics and philosophy articles (respectively, ca. 49% and 46% of all the non-subject structures), followed by the literary studies and economics texts (respectively, ca. 38% and 35%), and can be illustrated with such examples as the ones in (4):

(4)

Według Selimskiego махмурлия ‘podpity’ jest przymiotnikiem (Селимски 2012: 322). [Ling]

‘According to Selimski махмурлия ‘drunken’ is an adjective (Селимски 2012: 322).’

Zdaniem Davidsona intencję sprawcy wyraża powód działania [Phil]

‘In Davidson’s view, the perpetrator’s intention is indicated by the reason for the action’

Zdaniem Franaszka Miłosz ujawnia tu [BLOCK QUOTE] (Franaszek 2011: 380) [Lit]

‘In Franaszek’s view, here Miłosz reveals [BLOCK QUOTE] (Franaszek 2011: 380)’

It is now worth taking a more detailed look at the already-mentioned subject structures and draw a distinction between, on the one hand, cases where the subject position is occupied by a name or another expression referring to the author (i.e. the cited source is represented by a human being) and, on the other hand, those instances where the syntactic function of the subject is given to a noun phrase denoting an inanimate, research-related entity that is used instead of the actual agent of the process described by the reporting verb, as in:

(5)

Wcześniejsze badania (np. Weingera, 2000) wykazały, że [...] [Psych]

‘Previous studies (e.g. Weinger, 2000) showed that [...]’

Polskie badanie nie wykazało istotnych różnic w zakresie [...] (Wacławik, 2012) [Psych]

‘A Polish study did not show significant differences in [...] (Wacławik, 2012)’

Rezultaty badań pokazały, że [...] (Azmita i in., 2009; Killoren i in., 2015). [Psych]

‘Research results have shown that [...] (Azmita et al., 2009; Killoren et al., 2015).’

Wyliczenia z użyciem danych dla krajów [...] (Rosés, Wolf, 2020) pokazują, że [...] [Econ]

‘Calculations using data for countries [...] (Rosés, Wolf, 2020) show that [...]’

Niektóre z przełomowych prac poświęconych polityce kredytowej ujawniają ważną rolę [...] [Econ]

(Clair 1992; Keeton 1999; Keeton, Morris 1987; Sinkey, Greenawalt 1991)

‘Some of the groundbreaking studies on credit policy reveal the important role of [...]

(Clair 1992; Keeton 1999; Keeton, Morris 1987; Sinkey, Greenawalt 1991)’

Właśnie o magazynowaniu nazw w różnych obszarach mózgu przekonują prace [Ling]

Małgorzaty Rutkiewicz-Hanczewskiej, zwłaszcza monografia Neurobiologia nazywania (2016)

‘Małgorzata Rutkiewicz-Hanczewska’s studies, particularly her monograph Neurobiologia

nazywania (2016), argue for the storage of names in different areas of the brain’

Although the use of these so-called “abstract rhetors” (Halloran, 1984) may generally be somewhat limited in Polish, as compared with English, academic prose (Wiraszka, 2023), their function is to downplay the role of the cited author by suggesting “that the situation described is independent of human agency” (Hyland, 1998, p. 172), and in the research articles examined in this study their proportion is much higher in the psychology texts (ca. 40%) than in any of the remaining subcorpora, with the philosophy and literary studies articles at the very bottom of the rank (ca. 1%). The papers in economics had the second highest frequency of such inanimate nouns in the subject position (ca. 19%) with the citations, and the linguistics texts were less than average in this regard (ca. 11%).

Significant cross-disciplinary variation can also be observed in terms of the form in which the reported proposition is presented in the text. While a summary of a single source remains the predominant type of citation for all the disciplines in the corpus, the articles in the psychology and economics subcorpora virtually do not include quotations, as opposed to the linguistics, philosophy, and literary studies texts, where direct use of the cited author’s wording is quite common. The latter form of citation occurs most frequently in the literary studies papers, which involve extensive use of both short and block quotes from the existing scholarly literature[4] – quotations accounted for more than 41% of all citations in these texts. Despite being almost twice less frequent, both types of quotations were also commonly used in the philosophical articles (ca. 24% quotes in total). Interestingly, these two disciplines, i.e. philosophy and literary studies, are characterized by the lowest frequency of citations based on multiple sources (<3%). The proportions of the four different citation forms for each of the disciplines investigated in the present study are summarized in Table 4.

Table 4. Citation forms by discipline (in %)

The figures presented above also show that generalizations over several sources occur most frequently in the subcorpus of psychology (20%), followed by the texts on economics (16.54%). This could be one of the factors accounting for the previously mentioned predominance of non-integral citations, and possibly also the relatively higher proportions of non-subject structures, in these two subcorpora. It may well be the case that writers tend to use a single author’s name within a sentence and, when referring to claims or data put forth in several sources, they prefer to place multiple names in brackets, which naturally favors the use of non-subject structures.

The disciplines which most relied on the use of citations in the form of summaries and generalizations seem to be predominantly concerned with stating facts rather than with signaling scholars’ attitudes to the propositions introduced in the text. This is probably the reason why the articles in psychology and economics show a tendency to avoid any reporting structure (whether a reporting verb or an adjunct of reporting) with citations and, instead, to describe that which has been shown to be true (or false) in previous studies. As can be seen in Table 5, the proportion of reporting structures in both disciplines is below the corpus average (ca. 36% and 48%, respectively). By contrast, the citations in the research articles from the other three subcorpora tend to include a kind of reporting structure (whether a reporting verb or, less frequently, an adjunct of reporting) that somehow situates the cited author(s) vis-à-vis the propositions reported in the text.

Table 5. Reporting structures by discipline

Rather unsurprisingly, the disciplines which most frequently put scholars’ actions or attitudes in focus are philosophy, where ca. 72% of the citations identified in the texts were based on the use of a reporting structure, and literary studies, with more than 64% of reporting structures.[5] What this basically means is that, in contrast to the psychology and economics articles, the citations found in the papers in philosophy and literary studies were predominantly based on the use of a reporting verb. And it is worth noting here that while the number of different reporting verbs employed in the other four disciplines was fairly uniform and ranged from 69 (for psychology) to 110 (for linguistics), the lexical variation of reporting verbs in the subcorpus of philosophy was significantly higher: as many as 183 different reporting verbs have been identified, with such examples as doceniać ‘appreciate’, piętnować ‘condemn’, przezwyciężać ‘overcome’, wieszczyć ‘prophesy’ or zwalczać ‘fight; contest’.[6] It must be admitted, however, that most of these verbs occurred only once or twice in the whole subcorpus, and it is mainly the higher-frequency reporting verbs that can cast insightful light on the “knowledge-constructing practices of disciplinary communities” (Hyland, 1999a, p. 352) and “reflect broad disciplinary purposes” (Hyland, 2011, p. 183). The most frequent reporting verbs for each of the disciplines investigated in the present study are shown in Table 6.

Table 6. Most frequent reporting verbs

As can be seen from the lists above, some of the items occur among the top reporting verbs of all or most of the disciplines represented in the corpus. These include podkreślać ‘emphasize’, proponować ‘propose’, wskazywać ‘indicate’, and zwracać [uwagę] ‘point out’. However, valuable insight into disciplinary variation in terms of the discursive practices related to the use of reporting verbs in citations is to be gleaned from the relative frequencies of these items and their semantic affinity with other high-frequency verbs. An obvious difference in this regard can be observed among the items ranked first: whereas pisać ‘write’ is the most frequently employed reporting verb in three of the five subcorpora, namely literary studies, linguistics and philosophy (where it is used more than twice as often as the second items on the lists), the common top verb for psychology and economics is wskazywać ‘indicate’. Moreover these two verbs are used rather differently in the two sets of disciplines: while pisać, almost 98% of which occurs in the subcorpora of philosophy, linguistics and literary studies, denotes verbal communication by human agents, typically placed in the subject position and accompanied by a quotation, as in examples under (6), wskazywać means ‘to indicate [facts]’ and in the psychology and economics papers it is mainly used with inanimate, research-related nouns, as in (7).

(6)

Jeleński pisał za to, że „terenem Miłosza jest Natura” [Lit]

‘On the other hand, Jeleński wrote that [QUOTE]’

Filozof pisze tak: „[...]” [Phil]

‘The philosopher writes as follows: [QUOTE]’

O tym, że warto zweryfikować fonologiczny status /k′/ i /g′/, w sposób przekonujący pisała [Ling]

stosunkowo niedawno Magdalena Osowicka-Kondratowicz w artykule poświęconym

kategoriom fonologicznym współczesnej polszczyzny (Osowicka-Kondratowicz 2012)

‘Relatively recently, in her paper on the phonological categories of modern Polish,

Magadalena Osowicka-Kondratowicz (2012) convincingly wrote that it would be worth

examining the phonological status of /k′/ and /g′/’

(7)

Wyniki badań wskazują, że [...] (Heckhausen, Gollwitzer, 1987; Sotwin, 2010) [Psych]

‘Research results indicate that [...] (Heckhausen, Gollwitzer, 1987; Sotwin, 2010)’

Dostępne w literaturze dane wskazują, że zmęczenie, deprywacja snu, problemy zdrowotne, [Psych]

obniżony nastrój czy doświadczanie stresu mogą wpływać na [...] (Dominiak-Kochanek, 2017;

Grzegorzewska, 2012; Mash i Johnson, 1990).

‘The evidence available in the literature indicates that fatigue, sleep deprivation, health problems,

lowered mood and stressful experiences can affect [...] (Dominiak-Kochanek, 2017; Grzegorzewska, 2012; Mash & Johnson, 1990).’

Rezultaty dotychczasowych badań nad zagadnieniem zaangażowania interpersonalnego [Psych]

w bliskich związkach wskazują na brak istotności [...] (Kaczuba, Janicka, 2018).

‘The results of previous research on the problem of interpersonal engagement in close

relationships indicate a lack of significance [...] (Kaczuba, Janicka, 2018)’

[...] na pozytywny wpływ filara kapitałowego w systemie emerytalnym na wzrost gospodarki [Econ]

wskazuje wiele opracowań, stosujących bardzo różne podejścia badawcze (zob. np.: Agosin, 2001;

Davis, 2008; Edwards, 1996; Feldstein, 1974, 1980, 1996; Loayza i in., 2000; Samwick, 2000).

‘[...] numerous studies, based on very different research approaches, indicate a positive impact

of the capital pillar in the pension system on the growth of the economy (see, e.g, Agosin, 2001;

Davis, 2008; Edwards, 1996; Feldstein, 1974, 1980, 1996; Loayza i in., 2000; Samwick, 2000).’

Większość badań empirycznych wskazuje na dodatni związek [...] (Chavan, Gambacorta 2019; [Econ]

Festic i in. 2011; Jiménez, Saurina 2006; Klein 2013; Sobarsyah i in. 2020; Vithessonthi 2016)

‘Most empirical studies indicate a positive relationship [...] (Chavan, Gambacorta 2019;

Festic et al., 2011; Jiménez, Saurina 2006; Klein 2013; Sobarsyah i in. 2020; Vithessonthi 2016)’

It must be noted that the other most frequent reporting verb for psychology, i.e. wykazywać ‘demonstrate’, which was used as frequently as wskazywać, can be classified as a member of the same semantic field, namely that of verbs indicating scientifically established facts. The same holds for the third item on this list, i.e. potwierdzać ‘confirm’. With these three verbs accounting for nearly 25% of all reporting verbs, supported by some of the verbs further down the list (e.g. wykrywać ‘discover’, pokazywać ‘show’, ujawniać ‘reveal’, and stwierdzać in the sense of ‘find, discover’[7]), citations in the articles in psychology seem to be primarily aimed at indicating facts established in prior research. A similar picture seems to emerge from the highest frequency items for economics, with dowodzić ‘prove’ as the second most frequent verb, accompanied by pokazywać ‘show’, potwierdzać ‘confirm’, and wykazywać ‘demonstrate’ with somewhat lower frequencies. What is worth noting with regard to this argument is that a vast majority of the occurrences of these research-related verbs are to be found in the economics and psychology texts, for example 96% of wykazywać (68% in psychology and 28% in economics), 80% of dowodzić ‘prove’ (all in economics) and 100% of potwierdzać ‘confirm’ (56% in psychology and 44% in economics). What is more, the lists of the top reporting verbs for both disciplines feature an item that directly refers to conducting research. This is particularly evident in the case of the list for psychology, which includes both prowadzić [badanie] ‘conduct a study’ and the synonymous badać ‘investigate, study’.

In a similar vein, other communication verbs further down on the lists for linguistics, philosophy, and literary studies (e.g. podkreślać ‘emphasize’, nazywać ‘name, call’, wymieniać ‘list’, podawać ‘inform’, wspominać ‘mention’) fit in with the most frequent pisać ‘write’, thereby highlighting the role of discourse-related activities for writers in these disciplines. The apparent preference for communication verbs among linguists, philosophers and literary scholars, on the one hand, and for verbs denoting processes involved in doing research among psychologists and economists, on the other, seems to be borne out by the results of a classification of the reporting verbs in the corpus into three broad categories, depending on their denotation. As shown by the figures in Table 7, a majority of all the reporting verbs identified in both the psychology and economics corpora described research-related acts or procedures, while most of the reporting verbs in the philosophy, linguistics and literary studies corpora expressed verbal communication.

Table 7. Semantic categories of the reporting verbs in the corpus (in %)

The third semantic class of verbs, which refers to mental processes (verbs of cognition), was the least frequent category in all the disciplines except for literary studies and philosophy. It can be argued that these verbs most clearly evoke the image of a human being and are therefore predominantly used in integral citations with the author in the subject position, as illustrated by the examples in (8).

(8)

Przez ekwiwokację rozumie Pawłowski [...] [Phil]

‘Pawłowski understands equivocation as [...]’

Hönigswald interpretował ją jako formalny warunek [...] [Phil]

‘Hönigswald interpreted it as a formal condition [...]’

[...] Aleksandra Fiuta, który uważa, że [...] [Lit]

‘[...] of Aleksander Fiut, who believes that [...]’

Badaczka uznaje, że opis zdarzenia oddaje [...] (tamże). [Lit]

‘The researcher concludes that the description of the event reflects [...] (ibid.)’

The high degree of subjectivity introduced by cognition verbs like the ones above is highly incompatible with the focus on research procedures and results typical of the articles in psychology and economics (where verbs of cognition account for less than 8% of all reporting verbs), while it is well-suited to the discourses of literary studies and philosophy (where they represent, respectively, ca. 21% and 25% of all reporting verbs). The latter result is in line with Hyland’s (2009) finding for papers in philosophy, which in his study included 80% of all occurrences of the verb think in a corpus of English texts representing eight disciplines. Interestingly, the papers in linguistics seem to occupy the middle ground in this respect, most frequently employing verbs of discourse, followed by verbs of research, with the latter being more than twice as frequent as verbs of cognition.

5. Conclusion

The aim of this paper was to explore the ways in which writers representing different disciplines within the soft sciences report previous literature in their research articles written in Polish. Following the work pioneered by Hyland on cross-disciplinary variation in citation behavior in English academic prose, the present study has investigated the form in which the reported information is expressed, the syntactic structures used to refer to the cited sources as well as the reporting verbs used in the citations.

The findings presented in the preceding section suggest two quite distinctive tendencies in citation behavior which probably emerge from rather different community norms and values. On the one hand, writers in philosophy and literary studies seem to be centered around the cited scholars, regarding them as authorities in their areas of study, and to adopt a considerable degree of subjectivity in the linguistic forms employed in citations. This is most clearly reflected by their preference for integral citations, placing authors in the subject position (which highlights the authors’ agency), using the original wording of the cited scholars more often than in the other disciplines, higher-than-average proportion of reporting structures, and the propensity for reporting verbs that denote typically human abilities, namely verbal communication and higher-order cognition. These citation practices may thus be argued to embody the essence of humanities, i.e. a focus on the human being. On the other hand, writers in psychology and economics seem to be more motivated by some of the values underlying the hard sciences, namely objectivity and evidence-based, rather than authority-based, argumentation. This is manifested by discursive strategies aimed at diminishing the role of human subjects, such as the use of non-integral citations, non-subject structures, favoring matter-of-fact summaries and generalizations of the reported propositions, as well as a noticeable predilection for research-related reporting verbs. These citation patterns seem to represent some of the discursive conventions that distinguish social sciences from humanities, with the articles in linguistics generally falling somewhere in between with regard to the variables examined in this study.

Although the present study is limited to examining Polish research articles in the soft sciences only, it is worth highlighting certain obvious analogies to the results obtained by Hyland (1999a, 2009) for English. First of all, even if the writers in literary studies and philosophy use quotations more frequently than the writers in the other three disciplines, there is a general tendency for writers to use their own words when reporting other sources. As Hyland and Jiang (2019, p. 72) put it, “[t]his both facilitates greater succinctness, eliminating redundancy and stylistic quirks, while enabling writers to slant the original material closer to their own views and better incorporate it into their argument.” Moreover, the fact that the citations identified in the psychology and economics corpora are almost never based on quotations makes them similar to the hard disciplines in Hyland’s (1999) study (i.e. biology, physics and engineering), which did not employ quotations at all, as opposed to the soft disciplines of applied linguistics, marketing, philosophy and sociology. Another clear analogy is to be drawn between the Polish articles in philosophy, literary studies and, to a lesser extent, linguistics, which in the present study tend to rely on reporting verbs that denote verbal communication, and the English articles in the soft disciplines examined by Hyland (1999, 2009), which also showed a preference for discourse-related verbs, as opposed to the citations in the hard disciplines, which mainly used research-related verbs.

Admittedly, any comparison with Hyland’s findings for English must make allowances for the fact that the study reported on in the present paper examined all citations of the existing literature, including references to writers’ own previous research, while Hyland’s work focuses on citations of other authors’ research only. However, even with this caveat in mind, it can be argued that some of the soft disciplines investigated here, namely psychology and economics, seem to be less “soft” than others, at least in the ways in which they report previous scholarly literature. This makes them similar to the hard sciences, which tend to “represent knowledge as proceeding from impersonal lab activities rather than from the interpretations of researchers” (Hyland, 2011, p. 183). Future studies could take a more comprehensive look at this claim and verify it by using larger corpora of research articles (and possibly other genres, like theses), as well as including other soft disciplines which still publish in Polish.

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Summary

Keywords: citation, reporting verb, research article, academic prose

While there is considerable research on the ways in which authors of English academic texts refer to the existing literature, especially in research articles, scholarly interest in the linguistic patterns of academic citation in Polish remains very limited. Therefore, the present study examines how previous literature is reported in Polish research articles representing five disciplines classified as “soft” sciences, i.e. psychology, philosophy, economics, linguistics and literary studies. Focusing on both formal and semantic aspects of references to previous work, the present study uses a corpus of 50 research articles from 10 academic journals to demonstrate substantial cross-disciplinary variation, some of which accords with the existing evidence that has been marshalled in this regard for English. The findings confirm the existence of differing discoursal conventions used to construct knowledge and establish scholarly credibility in different academic disciplines.

Streszczenie

Odwołania do literatury przedmiotu w polskich artykułach naukowych: korpusowe studium zróżnicowania między dyscyplinami zaliczanymi do nauk „miękkich”

Słowa kluczowe: odsyłacze do literatury, czasowniki raportujące, artykuł naukowy, tekst naukowy

Istnieje wiele prac językoznawczych poświęconych temu, jak autorzy anglojęzycznych tekstów naukowych, zwłaszcza artykułów, odwołują się do literatury przedmiotu. Zainteresowanie badawcze językowymi cechami odsyłaczy do literatury naukowej w tekstach polskich jest natomiast bardzo ograniczone. Przedmiotem niniejszej pracy są odwołania do dotychczasowej literatury w artykułach naukowych publikowanych w języku polskim w ramach pięciu dyscyplin zaliczanych do tzw. nauk miękkich (ang. soft sciences), a mianowicie: psychologii, filozofii, ekonomii, językoznawstwa oraz literaturoznawstwa. Analiza obejmuje zarówno formalne, jak i semantyczne aspekty odwołań do literatury w korpusie 50 tekstów pochodzących z 10 czasopism naukowych i ukazuje istotne zróżnicowanie między badanymi dyscyplinami, zaś wyniki w dużej mierze pokrywają się z ustaleniami dokonanymi w tym zakresie dla artykułów anglojęzycznych. Wyniki wskazują na istnienie odmiennych konwencji dyskursywnych stosowanych w celu przekazywania wiedzy naukowej i budowania wiarygodności akademickiej przez przedstawicieli różnych dyscyplin naukowych.

Notes

1. [1] I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for bringing to my attention some of the studies mentioned in this paragraph.

2. 2

A similar phenomenon was noted by Hyland (1999a, p. 345) in the philosophy papers in his corpus of research articles written in English.

3. [3] I am using Hyland’s (1999a) terms for the three types of author acts proposed by Thompson & Ye (1991).

4. 4

As noted earlier, quotations from the literary pieces analyzed in these articles were not taken into consideration in the present study and they were, obviously, equally abundant.

5. [5] Interestingly, philosophy also had the highest frequency of reporting structures (67%) in Hyland’s (1999a) study.

6. [6] All Polish verbs are listed in their imperfective form in this paper, even in cases where the only or the predominantly used aspectual form was perfective.

7. [7] The Polish verb stwierdzać, marked with an asterisk in Table 6, occurs in either of two meanings in the corpus: ‘establish that a given state of affairs exists on the basis of observation or some data’ or ‘say something firmly and with confidence’ (“stwierdzać” in Żmigrodzki, 2024). It is the first of these two senses that predominates in the psychological texts (80%), while the verbal communication sense is dominant in the literary studies and philosophy subcorpora. The verb occurs equally frequently with both senses in the articles in economics.

Table of contents

Łukasz Wiraszka

Reporting previous literature in Polish research articles: a corpus study of cross-disciplinary variation within the soft sciences

1. Introduction

2. Literature review

3. Corpus and method

4. Findings and discussion

5. Conclusion

References

Summary

Streszczenie

Notes