THE DISCURSIVE ETHOS OF THE RESEARCHER-WRITER IN THE ACADEMIC GENRE OF THE DOCTORAL THESIS ABSTRACT

Abstract

This article proposes an enunciative analysis of a corpus of twenty-six doctoral thesis abstracts in the humanities and social sciences (HSS), drawn from the open-access platform HAL Science ouverte (2026). Drawing on the theoretical tools of enunciation linguistics, in particular the work of Benveniste, Ducrot, Maingueneau and Adam, we examine how the researcher-writer constructs a discursive ethos through three fundamental operations: enunciative responsibility (the presence or effacement of the subject), modalization (the degree of assertion and epistemic certainty), and textual framing (thematic organization and discursive deixis). The analysis reveals a tension constitutive of the genre between subjectivation and objectivation, between the visibility and the effacement of the researcher-speaker. The results highlight strategies that differ across disciplines and lead us to propose a taxonomy of the enunciative postures at work in this specialized discursive genre.