WRITERS’ STANCE MANIFESTED IN CITATIONS; ANALYSIS OF THE LITERATURE REVIEW CHAPTERS OF PHD THESES IN SOCIAL SCIENCES

Abstract

Citation practices are essential to construct thesis rhetoric. This practice attributes statements to others’ works (Hyland, 1999). As an essential discursive feature, these referring patterns need to be explored in L2 contexts (Kafes, 2017; Lee, Hitchcock & Casal, 2018; Peng, 2019). Pakistani academic discourse has not been studied for this purpose. The objective of this study is to investigate the authorial stance manifested in various citation forms blended with different functions and semantic roles.This studyhas analyzed in-text references in PhD theses across different subjects of Social Sciences. A corpus containing of thirty theses at the doctorial level was built. The study was delimited to literature review chapters only with 100 citations per thesis. The corpus was
analyzed by AntConc applying concordance as sub option and added by researcher’s own judgment. Thompson and Tribble’s (2001) work was adopted as theoretical model. It was found that majority of the authors focused on citations enclosed in parenthesis, while Source was found the most preferred sub-pattern. In conclusion, to enhance the quality of their works and make the reported text worth presenting, the research writers are supposed to have rigorous engagement with studies conducted earlier.In fact, using different patterns of citation to incorporate the rhetorical effects in the arguments is essential for the writers in Pakistan, as an L2 context.