creating an authorial presence in english-medium research articles abstracts by academic writers from different cultural backgrounds

In recent decades, the traditional perception of academic writing as impersonal prose conveying facts has given way to a view that sees it as an interactional process laden with cultural influence. due to this shift, authorial voice has become a major research focus in applied linguistics studies. this study involved a corpus-based textual analysis of self-representation markers in research papers by russian and chinese authors in the field of engineering. using hyland's interactional metadiscourse model (2005) and tang and john’s (1999) taxonomy of writer’s roles as the analysis frameworks, the study aimed to compare the features of authorial voice in english-medium research article (ra) abstracts by non-native writers from two different cultural backgrounds. to achieve this purpose, 98 ra abstracts were collected from four reputable scopus-indexed engineering journals. the differences in the use of self-mention markers are explained in terms of the national and international academic writing traditions and the level of competitiveness among scholars influencing an authorial stance in english-medium academic prose. the study has important implications for novice non-native english academic writers who aspire to take their work to an international audience.