This article discusses selected aspects of the organisation of the academic article introduction – a section of a central academic genre, recognised as both troublesome (Swales 1990) and strategically important, as it is at this stage that the reader forms the fi rst, and often lasting, impressions of the whole text. Based on Swales’ (1990) revised CARS model of article introductions and drawing on previous Polish–English contrastive studies (e.g., Duszak 1994; Golebiowski 1998, 1999), it looks into the placement, realisation, and role of the purpose statement in introductions to articles published in the years 2001-2006 in linguistics-related peer-reviewed Englishand Polish-language journals. It seeks answers to the following questions: (i) Is the statement of purpose a typical/recurrent feature of introductions to Polish-language articles? (ii) If it does occur in Polish, in which part of the introduction is it usually made by Polish authors as compared to English writers? (iii) What is the preferred way of announcing it in both groups of texts? and (iv) Can any assessment be made of its prominence in both languages on the basis of what precedes and what follows it? Contrary to what might have been expected on the basis of previous studies, the article demonstrates that the statement of purpose is in fact a stable element of the introduction to a Polish-language linguistics article, although its prominence depends on the presence of other rhetorical moves.

Defined as “the ways the writers project themselves into their texts to communicate their integrity, credibility, involvement, and a relationship to their subject matter and their readers” (Hyland, 1999: 101), stance can be expressed by a variety of means, including, among others, hedges, emphatics and attitude markers. The use of these elements – their frequency, distribution and variety in different text types – is language and culture-specific. This paper focuses on selected exponents of stance by which speakers of English and Polish express their assessment of the truth of a proposition and their commitment to this assessment, and more specifically, on high-value modal verbs of epistemic necessity and inference used in linguistics research articles in these two languages. The analysis is based on two corpora of research articles published in the years 2001–2006 in English- and Polish-language linguistics-related journals, each corpus consisting of 200 complete articles. The analysis focuses on the following modal and quasi-modal verbs: MUST, NEED, HAVE (GOT) TO (Eng.) and MUSIEĆ (Pl.) in an attempt to discuss their use in one specific genre and discipline but across languages and cultures. The results indicate that, compared to the English necessity and inference cluster, Polish MUST is heavily underrepresented, but that the proportion of epistemic and root meanings as well as the ratio of epistemic proper and indirect evidential senses is similar across the two studied corpora. It is also apparent that for the English data the relative frequency of individual modal expressions is different from that reported from non-academic varieties of English, and that the proportion of epistemic and root meanings for these modals is different in the studied sample and in non-academic contexts.

This paper refers to face and face-work to account for the ways in which academic authors strive to satisfy the need to establish their credibility as experts in the field, to present their research as a valuable addition to the existing knowledge, and to confirm their status as insiders – experienced members of the academic discourse community – in introductions to English-language linguistics articles. It relates the concern for face to the revised Create-a-Research-Space (CARS) model [John Swales, Genre Analysis, Cambridge: CUP, 1990] of rhetorical moves to better understand the choices the authors make in order to indicate a gap in the existing knowledge, to announce how their research intends to fill it in, and, in effect, to produce a publishable text. In particular, it examines references to other scholars and their research and explicit comments on the author’s own work and experience in 50 journal article introductions. The presented strategies are evidence of a dialogue the writing scholar undertakes with the discourse community by laying emphasis on contextualization of the research among other texts, by placing his/ her findings in relation to other fi ndings, by seeking acceptance for his/ her claims, and by attending to the social needs of others.

This paper presents the results of a small-scale study into advanced trainee interpreters’ performance in tasks which involve consecutive interpretation of openly evaluative texts, with particular focus on the use of agentless structures and nominalizations by male and female subjects. It seeks answers to the following questions: i) Is the interpreter’s involvement in the ongoing discourse a factor that may elicit agentless structures in the output? ii) Does the preference for such constructions seem to be related to the gender of the interpreter? The analysis is based on 40 interpretations of four formal addresses, of which two express criticism and the other two praise of the audience. One text in each set is addressed to students of English at the University of Silesia, a group to which the trainee interpreters belong and with which they identify. The results indicate that while there is no substantial difference in the use of agentless structures in contexts which involve identification of the interpreter with the ultimate receiver and in contexts which preclude identification, nominalizations tend to be used slightly more frequently in the former set of circumstances. It also appears that female interpreters are more likely to use nominalizations in texts which express open evaluation of the audience with which they identify, irrespective of the direction of valuation.