As someone working in linguistics and teaching international students, I
tend to see more problems in citation practices than other contributors to
this mail list.

Starting simply with "common knowledge" or common practice, do we--does
anyone--really problematicise and therefore source all common knowledge?
How is a Chinese student to understand the name of the 1914-1919 conflict in
Europe?  What is the name of the 1939-1945 conflict?  What is "the
Renaissance?"  If one says, for example, "Survey methodology developed
rapidly after the Second World War," does that need two citations, one
supporting the claim about survey methodology, the other, that there was
such a thing as "the Second World War"?

But even more fundamentally, if you are writing in a language other than
your mother tongue, what do you need to cite?   If the limit is the use of
"any words, phrases or even a general idea that you know has not fallen from
your own lips or been created in your own mind," our Chinese student would
have to cite each word, or if that seems absurd, each phrase.  "For
example?" "Of course?" "It has been said that...?"  Linguistics suggests
that much of our language is not words joined according to rules, with open
slots (Any noun + any verb + any object = sentence) but an accumulation of
formulaic phrases, so that the occasionally-seen guidance of citing
occasions of "more than three or five or seven words that are not your own"
is regularly violated by native speakers because that is how language
operates.  If the language is not your own, when does "saying it in your own
words" become meaningful?

This isn't to suggest that I believe there is no such thing as plagiarism,
or that prohibitions against it are an "eccentric practice confined to
outdated British universities" in the words of Furedi's recent screed
(Furedi, F. [2004, 6 Aug.]. Plagiarism stems from a loss of scholarly
ideals. The Times Higher Education Supplement, pp. 16-17.).  I agree with
Reddy, Donnan, Botes and other recent contributors that this is a teaching
issue.  (This, I think, was the saddest part of Furedi's piece: the
dismissal of the argument that plagiarism is in large part a learning
problem, and therefore that explaining plagiarism is beneath the role of
lecturers.)

I see plagiarism as a specific case of a general phenomenon,
intertextuality.  Intertextuality is both inevitable and desirable:
inevitable because of the nature of language, and desirable because we, as
teachers, want students to understand and draw on the knowledge of our
fields.  It's up to us to convey our own understanding of the space of
appropriate explicit acknowledgement.

Erik Borg
English Language Centre
Northumbria University

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