A Comparative Analysis Of Stance Markers In Research Article Introductions In Theoretical And Quantitative Linguistics

In academic writing,stance markers are always essential rhetoric means to express an author‘s opinions,attitudes and commitments.Such stance markers have been widely applied in disciplinary writing in academic discourse,because different academic communities have their disciplinary knowledge creation,disciplinary writing style,and their disciplinary rhetorical means.Considerable studies focused on varieties of using stance markers in different disciplines,but the differences between sub-disciplines are yet unclear.Also,most studies focused on the full text,but a specific section like the introduction is less discussed.To this end,the present study investigated the differences of distributions and patterns of stance markers in RA introductions of the two sub-disciplines in linguistics,i.e.theoretical linguistics and quantitative linguistics based on the framework of Hyland(2005a).These two sub-disciplines were chosen in consideration that they are unified within the territory of linguistics,while with huge differences in research methods and paradigms.Based on a corpus-based method,two corpora for each sub-discipline were built,each with near 80 high-quality research article introductions.Adopting a mixed method of qualitative and quantitative,the present study described the distributions of stance markers in each corpus semantically and grammatically first,then compared the overall distributions,proportions of the four types of stance markers and compared most frequently used items in each category stance markers between the RA introductions of the two sub-disciplines.The results found that the overall distribution of stance markers in the two corpora is quite similar.Semantically,hedges are the most frequently used stance markers;grammatically,verbs are the most frequently used word classes.Comparative analysis showed that RA introductions in both sub-disciplines are featured with frequent use of stance markers.In spite of the similarities,on the whole,they differ in the frequencies and the proportions of the four types of stance markers.In RA introductions,quantitative linguists use more self-mentions and attitude markers compared with theoretical linguists,but theoretical linguists prefer hedges.As for most frequently used items in four types of stance markers,the two sub-disciplines in RA introductions share several high frequent items as well as have some unique ones.These results can be accounted for by such factors as journal conventions,authors‘ preference,communicative purposes and different characteristics of the two sub-disciplines.This study has some implications.Theoretically,the study confirms the validity of Hyland‘s framework of stance markers(2005)in the genre of RA introductions in sub-disciplines and builds up epistemology of genre features of sub-disciplines.Empirically,the study is expected to enrich research on the divergence of sub-disciplines in linguistics and other disciplines.Pedagogically,instructors should guide students into an awareness of stance expression,and the conventions and characteristics of academic writing in their own disciplines.