A Corpus-based Diachronic Study On Disciplinary Variations Of Stance Nouns In Academic Discourse

Academic writing,intentionally organized for persuasive effect,requires the successful construction of authorial stances to transfer ideas,which makes the authorial stance a research magnet at home and abroad.In recent years,the study of stance nouns in academic discourse has paved a new way for researchers to investigate authorial stances,but limited attention has been paid to disciplinary variations and few diachronic studies have been found so far.Based on the framework of stance nouns proposed by Jiang & Hyland(2015)and by applying current corpus analyzing tools and a customized sampling and search Macro software which significantly reduced manual workload for inspection and thus increased accuracy and enabled the expansion of our corpus,this study compares and analyzes the disciplinary variations and constraints of stance nouns in terms of their frequency,distribution patterns as well as the change trend between 40 doctoral dissertations published in the 1980 s and the 2010 s in political economics and theoretical physics,a soft and hard discipline.This study is aimed at answering the following questions: 1)do disciplinary differences influence the use of stance nouns in political economics and theoretical physics? And in what ways? 2)Compared with dissertations published 30 years ago(1983-1988),current papers(2012-2017)are to what extent different or similar in terms of their frequency,distribution pattern and choice of stance nouns? And does this difference,if any,reflect certain trends of academic writing in this duration?Firstly,the results show that in terms of disciplinary differences,political economics,a soft discipline,uses 72% more stance nouns in its doctoral dissertations than the hard discipline,theoretical physics,and there is significant difference in the preference of using stance nouns of certain sub-classes between those two disciplines.Although the overall usage of stance nouns in political economics is higher,there are only four sub-classes including “event”,“discourse”,“cognition” and “quality” responsible for the surpass,a result consistent to this discipline’s rebuttal and referential need;at the same time,theoretical physics used more “manner” nouns to meet its need in discussing research methods and results,albeit in general the hard discipline used less stance nouns.The main reason for such results can be appointed to the difference of disciplinary culture.Furthermore,by extracting and comparing most used stance nouns in both disciplines,this study found that disciplinary culture has direct influence on author’s choice of stance nouns,as authors are more direct in political economics while they tend to be less explicit in theoretical physics.Secondly,in regard to diachronic differences,the frequency of stance nouns in both disciplines is getting closer as political economics sees a 13.7% drop to 67.415 cases per 10,000 words while the number for theoretical physics has increased 17.5% to 45.545 per 10,000 words.This is because cross-discipline research is gaining momentum over the 30 years.However,the gap between those two disciplines is filled mainly by “event” and “discourse” sub-classes.It is because political economics applied more and more “harder” methods in doing traditionally soft researches,which reduced the author’s referential need;while theoretical physics is becoming “softer” due to its growing need for references.Moreover,by comparing most frequently used stance nouns of each disciplines in those two decades,we can find authors in each discipline tend to keep their taste of stance nouns,which indicates that although diachronically the trend of cross-discipline research has an obvious impact on the demand of stance nouns,there is strong uniformity in expressing stance within disciplines.This property enables stance noun as a lexical and rhetorical stable instrument to study authorial stance diachronically.To discuss how authors express stance in different disciplines and times,this study comprehensively investigated the frequency,distribution patterns and choice of stance nouns,and drew some results accordingly.By building the disciplinary and time awareness of authorial stance and stance nouns,writers in academics discourse can construct their stance correctly and efficiently.Meanwhile,by providing and learning from the stance expressing training,teachers can guide their students with various disciplinary backgrounds more efficiently and students can avoid interference when reading and imitating research articles from other disciplines and times.