Textual Voices: A Cross Disciplinary Study of Attribution in Academic Discourse

The article focuses on disciplinary differences in the use of textual voices by comparing article openings in two 'soft disciplines': history and economics. The study starts from a description of the corpus compiled and of the analysis carried out on typs and functions of attribution. the discussion then concentrates on the status o fthe article openings in terms of the main function of the research article, i.e. that of establishing knowledge claims in the different disciplines.