| Research article is an important type of academic writing, which reports the latest research findings and gains academic reputation for scholars. It is known that research article is not a unidirectional transmission of information but a communication between writer and reader. During the negotiation of knowledge, the writer would inevitably intrude his or her own opinions, beliefs and voices in the construction of discourse. Just like any communication activity, academic writing is an act of identity construction. It is realized through a range of rhetorical and linguistic choices that the writer makes, especially the stance markers.But many scholars have the difficulty in self-identification in the academic interaction. There is a need to make a detailed analysis of authorial stance markers to reveal the discursive construction of writer identity in the academic interaction. Recently, discursive construction of writer identity attracts more and more attention. However, they mainly concentrate on the analysis of self-reference in the use of personal pronouns. Comparatively, there are fewer studies, which explore the writer identity construction in the use of authorial stance markers as a whole.The present study would investigate the frequency and distribution of authorial stance markers under the framework of Hyland’s stance system. Based on a systematic description of stance markers in RA, this study aims to explore how discoursal identity is constructed through authorial stance. Therefore, a corpus of 30 empirical research articles and four sub-corpora are established corresponding to the introduction, method, results, and discussion sections. And generic analysis and syntactical analysis of agentless structures would also be conducted to have a further comprehension about the construction of writer identity. This study aims to find answers for the following questions:1. What are the general features of overall frequency of stance markers in research articles?2. Does the distribution of stance markers show distinct features in the generic sections?3. What kinds of discoursal identities are constructed? Does the construction of authorial identities contribute to the academic writing?Through the data analysis, the major findings are concluded as the following:1. Hedges account for the largest proportion of the total number of authorial stance markers, followed by boosters, self-mention and attitude markers.2. Discussion and introduction sections have the most occurrences of stance markers. Method and results sections have relatively fewer.3. Authorial and reliable writer identities are constructed, which prompt the persuasiveness of the research articles. |
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