This paper examines voice alternation, that is, variation between the active and passive voice in academic Englishes. The focus is on differences regarding degrees of author involvement. A previous study on the use of be-passives in fifteen varieties of academic English (Hundt, Schneider & Seoane 2016) found voice alternation to be very similar in both contact and native (ENL) varieties of English, with only American English showing a pronounced tendency towards a more frequent use of actives. A more fine-grained analysis, however, revealed highly significant interdisciplinary variation: whereas in the hard sciences the default option to express a transitive event is the passive voice, in the soft sciences, preference is often given to the active. In this paper we do not compare varieties of English but concentrate on ENL data from the entire academic sections of ICE corpora (International Corpus of English) as a whole in order to uncover the functional role of actives and passives across disciplinary areas with regard to authorial presence. The results indicate that the differences attested do not correlate with differences in authorial involvement (We discovered this versus This was discovered) since texts remain equally impersonal. Other factors, such as the increasing informalization observed in various genres, will have to be contemplated in any comprehensive study of the rhetoric of science.

中文翻译：

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语音交替和作者在场：学术英语学科领域的差异

本文研究了语音交替，即学术英语中主动和被动语态之间的变化。重点是作者参与程度的差异。之前对 15 种学术英语（Hundt、Schneider 和 Seoane 2016）中使用 be-passive 的研究发现，在接触英语和母语 (ENL) 英语变体中，语音交替非常相似，只有美国英语显示出明显的更频繁地使用活性物质的趋势。然而，更细粒度的分析揭示了非常重要的跨学科变异：而在硬科学中，表达传递事件的默认选项是被动语态，而在软科学中，通常优先考虑主动语态。在本文中，我们不比较各种英语，而是专注于整个 ICE 语料库（国际英语语料库）学术部分的 ENL 数据，以揭示主动语和被动语在跨学科领域的功能作用。在场。结果表明，证明的差异与作者参与的差异无关（我们发现了这个与发现了这个），因为文本仍然同样没有人情味。在对科学修辞的任何综合研究中，都必须考虑其他因素，例如在各种类型中观察到的日益非正式化。