한국어 학술텍스트에서 나타난 피동표현 및 저자 입장 연구

Passive Voice and Stance Taking in Korean Academic Discourse

This paper discusses passive voice usage and how authors reflect their stance through passive voice in Korean academic papers. While traditionally considered one of the distinctive features in academic writing, passive voice can reveal the author's stance by deleting or de-emphasizing the subject within a sentence. Based on an analysis of 21 published research articles from Korean language and electronic engineering disciplines, the results indicate differences in the frequency of using passive voice across disciplines. The findings also suggest that authors use passive sentences for different purposes depending on the agent. When the agents are the authors themselves, they use passive voice in four contexts: making claims, establishing a procedure, interpreting data and research results, and making predictions and suggestions. On the other hand, the authors prefer the passive voice in two contexts when the agents are the others: pointing out the shortcomings of previous studies and presenting a critical perspective on research subjects. Although the corpus of this research is small and limited to two specific majors, the results may help students understand or make a good choice to use passive voice. Furthermore, the results will help students on handling stance taking in academic papers.