Citation Practices in the Literature Review: A Contrastive Study of Sudanese and British Applied Linguistics Ph.D. Theses
Manifest intertextuality is a fundamental aspect of all academic discourse, and, hence, this study purports to explore the myriad functions of citation in a representative and contrastive corpus drawn from 20 Literature Review chapters in the domain of Applied Linguistics, and equally divided among Ph.D. theses successfully defended in Sudan and Britain. A variety of typologies were utilized to elicit citations, including Thompson's (2005) classification of integral and non integral citations, together with Hyland's (2002) designation of denotative and evaluative functions associated with reporting verbs. Groom's (2000) and Petric's (2007) notions of averral and attribution, propositional responsibility and knowledge transformation also inform this investigation. Results indicate that the dense deployment of citations and the predilection both corpora have for integral structures, verbatim quotations and present active Discourse reporting verbs are largely dictated by the discursive and human imbued nature of Applied Linguistics. On the other hand, the findings reveal that Sudanese candidates formally and functionally employ citations in manners markedly different from their British peers. Thus, the Sudanese corpus is characterized by blatant errors, repetition and awkwardness in both documenting sources and reporting the findings of research. Moreover, naive unwarranted quotations and authorial evaluations were ubiquitously observed, as compared to the British corpus. More significantly, there were ample variations in the way in which the two groups conceive of the role of the Literature Review. While the British adopted a range of Writer oriented and metadiscoursal strategies to amalgamate and integrate the cited materials within their mainstream arguments, the Sudanese candidates were strictly concerned with unmediated and uncontested attribution of ideas to their authors. Such is the synthetic nature of the resultant type of this Literature Review that the writer's textual voice is submerged under the sheer burden of successive descriptive citations, thus eclipsing almost all of the objectives of this chapter in critiquing sources and subordinating the cited literature to the overarching transformative perspective of the thesis writer. The Discussion is illuminated through extensive quotations from the two corpora.