Publishing in English: ELF writers, textual voices and metadiscourse

In a global academic environment, increasing attention has been paid to the international use of English for publication purposes. The chapter presents a corpus-based study of the differences between authors’ final versions – seen as a case of writing in English as Lingua Franca – and published versions of papers. The economics component of the SciELF corpus – a collection of unrevised articles by ELF users – is compared to a larger corpus of published articles in Business and Economics. The comparison confirms the “cooperative imperative” of ELF users, though limited to a restricted range of general markers, and suggests a “selling imperative” in the process of revision, emphasizing authorial presence through personal deixis, epistemic markers and lexical cohesion.