Incorporating American Dreams into Australian Stories: Political Erasure and cultural transference in film adaptations of Australian Literary Classics

Eterio Pajares, Raquel Merino y José Miguel Santamaría (eds.)

Keep an "eye" on the text: The Use of Self-mention in the Academic Writing of Experts

One of the most controversial inquiries in academic writing is whether it is admissible to use first person pronouns in a scientific paper or not. Many professors discourage their students from using them, rather favoring a more passive tone, and thus causing novices to avoid inserting themselves into their texts in an expert-like manner. Abundant research, however, has recently attested that negotiation of identity is plausible in academic prose, and there is no need for a paper to be void of an authorial identity. Because in the course of the English Studies Degree we have received opposing prompts in the use of I, the aim of this dissertation is to throw some light upon this vexed issue. To this end, I compiled a corpus of 16 Research Articles (RAs) that comprises two sub-corpora, one featuring Linguistics RAs and the other one Literature RAs, and each, in turn, consists of articles written by American and British authors. I then searched for real occurrences of I, me, my, mine, we, us, our and ours, and studied their frequency, rhetorical functions and distribution along each paper. The results obtained certainly show that academic writing is no longer the faceless prose that it used to be, for I is highly used in both disciplines and varieties of English. Concerning functions, the most typically used roles were the use of I to take credit for the writer’s research process, and also those involving plural forms. With respect to the spatial disposition, all sections welcomed first person pronouns, but the Method and the Results/Discussion sections seem to stimulate their appearance. On the basis of these findings, I suggest that an L2 writing pedagogy that is mindful not only of the language proficiency, but also of the students’ own identity may have a beneficial effect on the composition of their texts.

Literary portraits of basque-american women from shadow to presence

268 p.

Basque legacy in the New World: on the surnames of Latin American presidents

[EN] In this article we explain the etymology of the surnames of Basque origin that some presidents of Latin American countries have or have had in the past. These family names were created in the language called Euskara, in the Basque Country (Europe), and then, when some of the people who bore them emigrated to America, they brought their surnames with them. Most of the family names studied here are either oiconymic or toponymic, but it must be kept in mind that the oiconymic ones are, very often, based on house-nicknames, that is, they are anthroponymic in the first place. As far as possible, we have related the surname, when its origin is oiconymic or toponymic, to its source, i.e. to the house or place where it was created.