A Corpus-based Disciplinary Comparison Of Authorial Stance Marking In Academic Writing

Stance,as the representation of authors' expression of attitudes,epistemic judgements,and interactional involvement,is critical in academic writing.It is realized prototypically through various authorial stance markers,of which three main types have been proposed in the literature:epistemic,attitude,and self-mention markers.Studies up to date have shown that stance is represented differently across different disciplines,such as natural science versus social science and across different academic genres.Yet,it is still unclear how and to what extent these differences manifest themselves through the employment of authorial stance markers across different disciplines.To address the above problem,the present study compared the authorial stance markers across four disciplines representative of natural science,social science,engineering,and liberal arts,with the analytic framework of authorial stance markers in academic writing.Four corpora were created based on selected disciplines:sociology,applied linguistics,biology,electrical&electronic engineering,representing both soft and hard sciences.Each corpus consists of 80 state-of-the-art research articles(RAs)from the 20 top journals as ranked by the Thomson Reuters 2016 Journal Citation Reports.The concordance tool AntConc3.5.2 was used to compare the frequencies and lexical choices of the authorial stance markers across different disciplines.Their similarities and differences were analyzed to reveal the features of stance markers from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives.Results showed that in the soft disciplines,especially sociological articles,writers employed more stance markers and preferred to express their viewpoints in a more interpretative and interactional way,while in hard disciplinary articles,writers used fewer stance markers and were inclined to directly present their work,such as experiments,simulation and formula,etc.Moreover,such typical soft and hard disciplinary features were attenuated in applied linguistic and biological texts.Applied linguistic articles even tend to be more impersonalized shown by the least employment of the first-person structures.Notably,engineers employed more modal verbs of booster and the first-person plural structures,which seems to make their identities prominent but actually serve to highlight their work and contribution in their field.These disciplinary features indicate that four disciplines in this study are in a knowledge-knower continuum.Sociological and engineering articles incorporate typical"knower" and "knowledge" features respectively,with applied linguistics and biology falling in between.These findings have further implications for stance uses in RAs and their disciplinary difference,and the teaching of English as a second language.