Stance taking and passive voice in Turkish

Abstract

This study aims at describing the functions of passive voice and how authors reflect their stance through those functions in Turkish academic discourse. Depending on the findings of a corpus based research, this study makes a counterpoint to functionalist views on the ground that passivization does not necessarily result in promoting agents in discourse, and it may not reflect the preference and perspective of writers when used under structural constraints. This study proposes a source-based pattern for the use of passive voice in academic discourse. The distribution of the passive clauses show that writers use passive clauses for different purposes depending on the source of information in epistemic sense. When the source is the writers, they make use of passive voice in four contexts: referring to a phase of their research, guiding the readers to some part of the text, making claims, predictions and suggestions. The writers prefer the passive voice in two contexts when the source is the others: Citing the contemporary work and reporting generic assumptions and shared knowledge.