Introductory 'it' patterns in English and Italian academic writing: a cross-generic and cross-cultural analysis

This paper presents the preliminary results of a cross-generic and cross-cultural analysis of phraseological patterns in academic writing. More specifically, the study looks at the use of the English introductory ‘it’ patterns and its Italian equivalents (i.e. the it v-link ADJ that-clause and it v-link ADJ to-infinitive clause / It is possible that…; it is difficult to see...; E’ vero che…; è possible osservare...), as markers of personal stance in comparable corpora of academic research article openings, i.e. “the opening section up to and including the second paragraph of each article” (Silver and Bondi 2004: 121), and book review articles in English and Italian in the discipline of history. The aim of the paper is to explore whether and to what extent the pattern/meaning associations for these patterns vary across academic genres and cultures. A quantitative analysis of the corpus data reveals significant variation in the distribution of these patterns across both genres and cultures, and a qualitative analysis of the corpora confirms that variation is not arbitrary but motivated by genre-specific purposes and culture-specific traditions, respectively.