Community and creativity: a corpus approach to identity in academic writing.

Abstract

Identity is a central organizing principle of our social lives, yet remains something of an elusive and contested concept throughout the social sciences. Recent research, however, has emphasized the close connections between writing and the construction of an author's identity as we negotiate representations of ourselves through the discourses of our communities. In academic contexts this is often viewed as a repressive and determining system which crushes creativity and privileges certain ways of making meanings, so encouraging the performance of certain kinds of identities. We can, however, see disciplinary conventions as a pattern of options which allows writers to actively accomplish an identity through their discourse choices. In this paper I offer a new way of conceptualizing identity and suggest how corpus methods can be used to inform the idea that identity is performed through language. I do this by exploring the published work of two leading celebrities in applied linguistics: John Swales and Debbie Cameron. By comparing the single authored output of each author with a broader applied linguistics corpus of 750,000 words, I show how their linguistic choices reflect distinctive discoursal identities which mark out their work from the rest of us