Abstract

Several authors interested in the field of academic writing agree on the fact that the discursive process of attribution of knowledge refers to the responsibility of the content presented in the academic discourse. Consequently, the attribution of knowledge is evidence of the position of the author his/her writing (Hyland, 2004a; Beke, 2008; Bolivar, Beke y Shiro, 2010). Thus, the aim of this paper is to compare the discursive process of attribution of knowledge in undergraduate and master's theses in Linguistics and Philosophy. In order to accomplish this goal we have used two categories of analysis, namely, the use of the first person and use of citation. The methodology for the analysis considers the identification and description of the attribution mechanisms mentioned above. The corpus consists of 20 theses (5 BA in Linguistics, 5 Masters in Linguistics, 5 BA in Philosophy and 5 Masters in Philosophy). Among the main results, we may note that there are differences between disciplines and levels in the way authors carry out the attribution of knowledge. It is worth mentioning the emergence of various subtypes of cites which are not described in other investigations. In conclusion, we can state that the ways the author carries out the attribution of knowledge are different in each discourse community and even in a single genre within the same discourse community.