A Corpus-Based Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of Objectivity Manifestations in Academic Texts

This study aimed at investigating the manifestations of objectivity in American academic texts across different disciplines and various time spans. To achieve this, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was surveyed in terms of the frequency of occurrence of the four identified linguistic features (i.e., passive voice, impersonality, hedging, and attitude markers) as the indicators of objectivity (e.g., Alvin, 2014; Bal-Gezegin & Baş, 2020) to find the cross-disciplinary differences during the last twenty years. The results indicated that passive voice was employed differently across the academic disciplines of COCA and the notion of impersonality was more realized in hard sciences in comparison to soft ones. Moreover, the findings revealed a decline in the occurrence of passive voice through time in all the academic disciplines. In addition, hedging and attitude markers were more manifested in hard sciences probably due to the writers’ inclination to be judged objectively. Finally, objectivity was shown to have a steady increase in American academic texts implying that, though the authors of academic texts revealed less inclination to employ passive voice to avoid difficulty and ambiguity, they have employed less personal authorial references to stick to the notion of objectivity and impartiality during the recent years.