Attribution in novice academic writing

Abstract

Academic attribution, the direct acknowledgement of external sources, is investigated in two corpora of novice academic English, representing first and second language writing in linguistics. The forms and uses of attribution are analysed in a formal-functional framework. There is an overall underrepresentation of attribution in the learner corpus. However, the corpora have a similar proportional distribution of integral and non-integral attribution, but a difference in subtypes of these. Undated attributions are discussed as a special case. They occur in specific contexts, of which reference to course reading is peculiar to novice writing. Comparisons with expert corpora in Norwegian and English indicate that some, but not all, of the differences between the novice corpora may be linked to influence from the learners’ first language and culture. Keywords: academic English, novice writing, attribution, Norwegian learners of English