generic pronominals, pronoun patterns, gender, academic texts, communication strategy

The paper focuses on the use of generic pronominals in academic texts. The use of generics in academic texts is regarded as a specific type of communication strategy that realises the interaction between the writer and the reader. Recently, generics have received much attention in the studies by Balhorn (2004), Baranowski (2002), or Parini (2004) who investigated them in various registers of spoken and written English. However, there is not much research on generic pronominal patterns in academic texts. Thus the paper addresses the question of how generics are employed in academic texts and, in particular, how they are used in two disciplines from social sciences: linguistics and economics.