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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2011

When cite is right : difficulties facing French researchers publishing in English

Résumé

This paper focuses on citation in scientific research articles. Reporting the results and claims of other authors is a crucial skill in positioning one's own research findings and conclusions, and has therefore been investigated in several studies (e.g. Swales 2004; Hyland 1999). Although both disciplinary and cultural factors may impinge on citation practices (Fløttum et al. 2006), the specific linguistic problems of non English-speaking researchers in this area have received little attention. Our aim here is to investigate the different citation practices in French and English academic publication, in order to identify the potential problem areas for French researchers when publishing in English. To this end, two corpora have been collected: a corpus of pre-publication draft manuscripts written in English by French academics, in several fields (engineering, science, and computational linguistics), drawn from the two authors' long-standing experience of editing research manuscripts; and a smaller reference corpus of research articles published in French in the same disciplines. We will first briefly review certain formal differences between citation practices in French and English, which may influence French researchers' citing behaviour, before investigating what appear to be the main problem areas: cohesive devices, in particular ambiguity due to the inappropriate use of anaphora and deictics; lexical choices in the reporting verbs used and referring items such as selon; and tense usage of the reporting verbs. The study will attempt to identify the origin of the anomalies noted (cultural, linguistic or other) and to assess the impact of these problems on the clarity and rhetorical effectiveness of the argument. By comparing the results with those of studies on the citation practices of novice writers (Thompson & Tribble 2001; Pecorari 2006; Petrić 2007), we hope to pinpoint some of the more specific intercultural facets of citation practices in international research publication, and to contribute to ESP training materials in this area.

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-02423559 , version 1 (24-12-2019)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-02423559 , version 1

Citer

Shirley Carter-Thomas. When cite is right : difficulties facing French researchers publishing in English. NaviLire Research Group Conference on reported speech, May 2011, Bergame, Italy. ⟨hal-02423559⟩
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