Shaping Academic Voice: Intellectual Style and Metadiscourse in Research Writing

 This study explores the impact of an intellectual style on metadiscourse choices made by Russian academic writers. The article aims to investigate the influence of the Teutonic intellectual style on metadiscourse patterns in theoretical and applied linguistic research article introductions written by Russian linguists. The analysis, based on J. Galtung’s model of intellectual styles, examines 120 academic texts. The results of the study showed that Russian academic prose, often associated with Teutonic influence, is characterized by a high frequency of intensifiers and a significant presence of hedging and relational markers. However, self-reference markers are rare and appear mostly in the form of the first-person plural pronouns, regardless of whether the author is single or multiple. No involvement markers were found in the corpus. The conclusion is that although the Teutonic intellectual style plays a certain role, it is not decisive for the rhetorical choices of Russian academic writers. The influence of international academic writing traditions, particularly those based on the Saxon intellectual style, seems evident in the use of hedge markers and relational markers that promote closer interaction with the reader. The study suggests that the categorization of the Russian academic discourse as exclusively that of Teutonic intellectual style requires further research with a larger corpus. Further research prospects may include the analysis of metadiscourse patterns in other disciplines, diachronic variations in the metadiscourse of different authors, and other categories of metadiscourse features in academic prose. 

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