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Disciplinary discourses: Writer stance in research articles
... To effectively convince readers about the significance and value of their research, a proficient academic writer must go beyond the mere presentation of an accurate depiction of external reality. The need of developing the necessary abilities to achieve these rhetorical objectives via written communication is widely recognized as essential for achieving success in the academic realm (Hyland 1999;Lancaster 2016). Numerous scholarly studies have been conducted to explore the various linguistic pathways via which stance is conveyed (e.g., Charles 2004). ...
... Attitude markers, which are the focus of the current study, have been identified as "amazing adverbials" (Biber & Finegan, 1988), "attitudinal stance adverbials" (Biber et al., 1999), "content disjuncts" (Quirk et al.,1985), and "comment adverbs" (Swan, 2005). The expression of writers' affectional values and their perspectives towards the content and/or audience may be communicated via the use of attitude markers (Vande Kopple, 1985;Crismore et al., 1993;Hyland, 1998bHyland, , 1999. Simply, the concept of "attitude" or "attitudinal stance" is used to characterise the manner in which a speaker or a writer expresses their viewpoint or evaluation of a language statement. ...
... The study of attitude adverbials has been the focus of many researchers. Based on an analysis conducted by Hyland (1999Hyland ( , 2005Hyland ( , 2008, it was observed that writers in the hard (scientific ) discipline, such as chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering ..etc, used a lower frequency of attitude markers in their research articles when compared to authors in the soft (Humanities) discipline, such as arts and sociology. The soft field was distinguished by the absence of reliable quantitative methods to support claims, which necessitates a more explicit evaluation. ...
... To effectively convince readers about the significance and value of their research, a proficient academic writer must go beyond the mere presentation of an accurate depiction of external reality. The need of developing the necessary abilities to achieve these rhetorical objectives via written communication is widely recognized as essential for achieving success in the academic realm (Hyland 1999;Lancaster 2016). Numerous scholarly studies have been conducted to explore the various linguistic pathways via which stance is conveyed (e.g., Charles 2004). ...
... Attitude markers, which are the focus of the current study, have been identified as "amazing adverbials" (Biber & Finegan, 1988), "attitudinal stance adverbials" (Biber et al., 1999), "content disjuncts" (Quirk et al.,1985), and "comment adverbs" (Swan, 2005). The expression of writers' affectional values and their perspectives towards the content and/or audience may be communicated via the use of attitude markers (Vande Kopple, 1985;Crismore et al., 1993;Hyland, 1998bHyland, , 1999. Simply, the concept of "attitude" or "attitudinal stance" is used to characterise the manner in which a speaker or a writer expresses their viewpoint or evaluation of a language statement. ...
... The study of attitude adverbials has been the focus of many researchers. Based on an analysis conducted by Hyland (1999Hyland ( , 2005Hyland ( , 2008, it was observed that writers in the hard (scientific ) discipline, such as chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering ..etc, used a lower frequency of attitude markers in their research articles when compared to authors in the soft (Humanities) discipline, such as arts and sociology. The soft field was distinguished by the absence of reliable quantitative methods to support claims, which necessitates a more explicit evaluation. ...
... Compared to the soft disciplines, the hard disciplines were more pronounced in the trend, which can be attributed to discipline-specific knowledge construction practices. Medicine and mechanical engineering tend to construct knowledge based on objective observations of real-world processes and convey meanings in a highly compressed code (Hyland, 1999). Economics involves subjective interpretations of economic phenomena or empirical cases, as well as explanations of theoretical constructs and economic models (Cacchiani, 2017;Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2021), leading to a relatively more elaborated style of writing. ...
... Moreover, soft disciplines often involve the analyses of qualitative and ethnographic data (Chan, 2015), which requires a writing style that allows for a more elaborated discussion of human experiences, cultural phenomena, or societal issues. Hard disciplines have a relatively objective knowledge base (Fløtum, et al., 2006), favoring the construction of knowledge based on "empirical evidence and the creations of facts through experimentation and observations" (Jiang, 2017, p. 96), rather than subjective interpretations of the phenomena under study (Hyland, 1999). Arguments in hard disciplines are more highly standardized and less discursive (Hyland, 2013). ...
... As a result, writing in soft disciplines often prioritizes accessibility. Despite the use of specialized terms, soft disciplines use everyday terms (Hyland, 1999) and elaborated language that can be understood by a wider audience to make the content of text accessible to those outside the field. ...
This study investigated the phrasal complexity of academic writing from a diachronic perspective. Specifically, based on a corpus of 1,920 research articles (RAs) from soft disciplines (education and economics) and hard disciplines (medicine and mechanical engineering), this study examined the diachronic changes and disciplinary variations in the phrasal complexity of RAs from 1970 to 2020. Nine noun phrase modifiers from Biber et al.’s (2011) framework were adopted for the measurement of phrasal complexity. Results of diachronic analysis reveal an increasing trend in the phrasal complexity of RAs in the four disciplines over the past 50 years, and this trend is more pronounced in the hard disciplines than in the soft disciplines. In addition, the results show significant disciplinary differences in the use of noun phrase modifiers at most time points, with more clausal modifiers in the soft disciplines and more phrasal modifiers in the hard disciplines. These observed diachronic and disciplinary patterns of use of noun phrase modifiers in RAs are possibly associated with the evolving discipline-related epistemological characteristics. These findings have useful implications for EAP writing research and pedagogy.
... Hedges indicate writers' lack of commitment to the certainty of their proposition, while boosters allow writers to express their confidence about the validity of a proposition (Holmes,1988;Hyland, 2004;Peacock, 2006;Hu & Cao, 2015). Hedges and boosters are crucial in advanced academic discourse as they are seen as resourceful rhetorical devices in scientific discourse to gain discourse community acceptance of knowledge claims and to build interpersonal solidarity with readers (Hyland, 1999;Lancaster, 2016). However, between hedges and boosters, Arab World English Journal www.awej.org ...
... However, between hedges and boosters, Arab World English Journal www.awej.org ISSN: 2229-9327 363 hedges are found to be the more dominant stance markers in scientific writing (Salager-Meyer, 1994;Hyland, 1999;2005b) particularly in RA results and discussion sections (Salager-Meyer, 1994) and they mainly function as indicative markers of writers' research findings allowing room for disagreement. Hyland (1999) also found hedges (such as indicate and suggest) to be used three times more often compared to boosters (such as show and find) as discourse-oriented verbs in his science and engineering sub-corpora. ...
... ISSN: 2229-9327 363 hedges are found to be the more dominant stance markers in scientific writing (Salager-Meyer, 1994;Hyland, 1999;2005b) particularly in RA results and discussion sections (Salager-Meyer, 1994) and they mainly function as indicative markers of writers' research findings allowing room for disagreement. Hyland (1999) also found hedges (such as indicate and suggest) to be used three times more often compared to boosters (such as show and find) as discourse-oriented verbs in his science and engineering sub-corpora. ...
Successful scientific writers make use of various lexico-grammatical features to assert their authorial voice in ways that their target audience finds most convincing. While many studies have focused on the use of stance markers in scientific writing, very few have reported on the voice construction of Malaysian scientific writers. To address this, this paper reports a three-way comparative study of stance-taking made by Malaysian scientific writers, their international counterparts as well as novice writers. Analyses were conducted on a 1.2-million-word corpus of 212 published research articles written by local and international writers and 14 unpublished papers by local writers. Using Hyland’s (2005b) taxonomy of authorial stance markers, we found that both Malaysian experts and their international counterparts displayed similar patterns, albeit different approaches to stance-taking. In particular, Malaysian experts were found to prefer boosters the most when establishing their niche, while their international counterparts chose to use first-person plural pronouns and hedges for positioning their results. Novice writers, on the other hand, consistently showed a lack of strategies but tended to take an attitudinal stance in the discussion and conclusion segments. The differences found in novice and expert writers as well as between Malaysian writers and their international counterparts, point towards the complexity of stance-taking and stance-marking in research writing. This study shows that linguistics devices for marking attitudinal commitments towards propositions possibly mark individual aspects of voice and contribute to a broader conception of a writer’s self-representation within a text.
... Recent research has also aimed at aligning LLMs to incorporate confidence levels more naturally in their outputs (Yang et al., 2023;Lin et al., 2022). One widely studied method for conveying confidence is through the use of epistemic markers, which verbally signal the model's level of certainty (Lakoff, 1973;Hyland, 2005Hyland, , 2014. Zhou et al. (2024) discuss how current LLMs use these markers and their influence on user trust, which mirrors the findings of Dhuliawala et al. (2023). ...
... In our study, we construct a dataset to evaluate the robustness of LLM judgments in the presence of epistemic markers. Specifically, these markers can be categorized into two types (Lakoff, 1973;Hyland, 2005Hyland, , 2014: Strengtheners (S), such as " very confidently," which conveys a sense of certainty, and Weakeners (W), like "I'm not sure," which suggest uncertainty. We utilize the top 20 most frequently generated Strengtheners and Weakeners each, iden-tified from recent LLM outputs, as reported by Zhou et al. (2024). ...
In line with the principle of honesty, there has been a growing effort to train large language models (LLMs) to generate outputs containing epistemic markers. However, evaluation in the presence of epistemic markers has been largely overlooked, raising a critical question: Could the use of epistemic markers in LLM-generated outputs lead to unintended negative consequences? To address this, we present EMBER, a benchmark designed to assess the robustness of LLM-judges to epistemic markers in both single and pairwise evaluation settings. Our findings, based on evaluations using EMBER, reveal that all tested LLM-judges, including GPT-4o, show a notable lack of robustness in the presence of epistemic markers. Specifically, we observe a negative bias toward epistemic markers, with a stronger bias against markers expressing uncertainty. This suggests that LLM-judges are influenced by the presence of these markers and do not focus solely on the correctness of the content.
... As noted above, writing becomes more challenging if the task involves argumentation. Though argumentative writing, defined as a piece of writing that 'attempts to support a controversial point or defend a position on which there is a difference of opinion' (Richards and Schmidt, 2002, p. 337), is one of the most common genres (Hyland, 1999), it is the most difficult for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners and English as a Second Language (ESL) learners (Lee and Deakin, 2016;Yoon, 2021). It requires taking a position in an argument over a controversial topic for the purpose of persuading a group of people of the validity of one's claim. ...
... Metadiscourse has been labelled stance (Biber and Finegan, 1989;Hyland, 1999), evaluation (Hunston and Thompson, 2000), attitude (Halliday, 1994), appraisal (Martin, 2000), epistemic modality (Hyland, 1998) and metadiscourse markers (Crismore, 1989;Hyland, 2005;Hyland and Tse, 2008). The term metadiscourse has been proposed by Harris (1959) to describe how texts' recipients perceive a piece of writing as intended by writers or speakers. ...
A few studies have explored the use of interactional metadiscourse markers in argumentative writing by male and female college students. More importantly, none explored the topic of metadiscourse resources with respect to gender-sensitive topics. Thus, the present study aims at examining the exploitation of interactional metadiscourse markers by Saudi male and female English as a Foreign Language (EFL) college students in their writing about ‘Who are Better Drivers, Men or Women?’. The study is corpus-based on students’ essays. The corpus consists of four sub-corpora: (a) men favouring men, (b) men arguing for women, (c) women arguing for men and (d) women writing in favour of women. We followed a qualitative and quantitative approach to data analysis. Using AntConc and Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model of interactional markers, the results reveal that female writers employed attitudinal lexis, hedges, self-mentions and boosters more than male writers. As for the variables of gender and stance choice, females arguing for men’s driving significantly utilised hedges more than the other three groups. Additionally, female writers writing in support of female drivers significantly used self-mentions more than male writers arguing for men’s driving. This study shows that sensitive topics may cause a difference in the distribution of metadiscourse markers used by people of both genders, and it provides some pedagogical implications for EFL instructors and curriculum developers.
... RVs in academic discourse, especially in English-medium academic writing, is a well-established area of scientific inquiry that focuses on investigating the distribution, frequency, and pragmatic roles of RVs (Bloch, 2010;Breeze, 2017;Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2008;Doró, 2014a;Hyland, 1999a;Ilchenko & Kramar, 2022;Kapranov, 2023a;Malmström, 2008;Yang, 2012). Judging from the literature, RVs are treated in the prior studies through the lenses of their reference to (i) citation practices, (ii) knowledge-stating, (iii) stance, and (iv) evidentiality (Bloch, 2010;Breeze, 2017;Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2008;Doró, 2014a;Hyland, 1999bHyland, , 2014Ilchenko & Kramar, 2022;Malmström, 2008;Yang, 2012). ...
... In applied linguistics, RAAs are argued to involve such obligatory moves, as (i) the study aim, (ii) research methodology, and (iii) the summary of the results (Dos Santos, 1996;Golebiowski, 2009;Pho, 2008;Tseng, 2011), which seem to correlate with a fairly standard sequence "introduction-purpose-methods-results-discussion" (Bhatia, 1993;Can et al., 2016;Hyland, 1999a;Jiang & Hyland, 2017). Similarly, RAAs in applied psycholinguistics and theoretical psycholinguistics quite often encompass a set of moves that consists in (i) instigating the reader's interest in the topic, (ii) presenting the focus of the article, (iii) outlining the study design, (iv) providing the major findings, and (v) pointing out to the general conclusions and further research (Saidi & Khazaei, 2021). ...
The article presents a quantitative corpus-based study that aims to shed light on the frequency and distribution of reporting verbs (for instance, indicate, posit, etc.) associated with evidentiality that are found in research article abstracts (RAAs) in applied linguistics and applied psycholinguistics. Theoretically and methodologically, the study is informed by the literature (Söderqvist, 2020; Szczygłowska, 2022), which demonstrates that reporting verbs may mark evidentiality in scientific discourse. In order to establish the frequency of the occurrence of reporting verbs associated with evidentiality, a corpus of RAAs in applied linguistics and applied psycholinguistics was collected and, subsequently, analysed in software program AntConc version 4.0.11 (Anthony, 2022). The results of the quantitative analysis revealed that show and suggest were the most frequent reporting verbs associated with evidentiality in the corpus of RAAs in applied linguistics and applied psycholinguistics alike.
... In academic writing, abstracts may function to grab readers' attention (Ngai & Singh, 2020), since they can be strategically crafted to intrigue readers into the subsequent reading of the full text (Hyland & Tse, 2005). To do so, writers tend to use language that expresses attitudinal and evaluative meanings in academic writing (e.g., Hyland, 1998Hyland, , 1999Hyland, , 2004Hyland, , 2005. Negation is such a rhetorical device that authors adopt to engage with readers in academic writing (Jiang & Hyland, 2022). ...
... A limited number of negations that function as boosting indicates that writers are more cautious about the effectiveness of their negative arguments than expressing attitudes in academic abstracts. In explaining why boosting is the least frequent function, Hyland (1999, Hyland & Jiang, 2016 explained that the use of boosters tends to mute the different viewpoints of readers, and thus may not only decrease the willingness to communicate but also impede effective interactions between writers and readers. We could also hypothesize that publishing in high-impact journals such as Science made the writers less confident about their negative arguments. ...
Researchers’ investment in reader engagement includes the construction of an appealing abstract. While numerous studies have been conducted on abstracts’ rhetorical features, scant attentiohas been paid to negation use in academic writing, and empirical studies are even rarer. The current study seeks to narrow the research gap both from a general and diachronic perspective by adopting an interpersonal model of negation. We found that while not, no, and little tend to be the commonly used negative markers in Science abstracts, the use of little increased diachronically but decreased for not and no. Functionally, writers prefer to use interactive negations and employ relatively more negative markers that function as consequence (interactive dimension) and hedging (interactional dimension) in their abstracts. Finally, we discussed the possible reasons for such results as well as their pedagogical implications.
... Grant applications, conference abstracts, acknowledgements and randomised control trials, for example, all work to sell an idea or the writer's credibility to readers. Rhetorical devices are deployed to 'market' (Fairclough, 1995), 'boost' (Hyland, 1999) or 'hype' (Miller et al., 2019) the importance or viability of research, expand its visibility and associate the writer with an intended audience (Bhatia, 2005). The promotion of research findings, moreover, seems to be growing with concern expressed by scientists and editors about the widespread use of 'positive descriptors' (Vinkers et al., 2015) and 'drama words' (Wheatley, 2014). ...
... professional (Liu & Zhang, 2021) genres as well as spoken (Zou & Hyland, 2022b) and written (Hyland, 1999) modes. ...
Covid‐19 was the greatest public health crisis of a century, accounting for millions of deaths and initiating an urgent surge of published biomedical research. In this climate of social anxiety, researchers scrambled to publicize their work and achieve a medical breakthrough. The use of journal highlights, a brief bullet pointed list summarising the novel results of a study, is an important tool in this promotional endeavour. In this study we focus on the stance taken by authors in this genre by examining 300 highlights dealing with the virus and comparing them with 300 from articles in the same 16 journals on other issues. Our results show significantly greater use of stance markers in the Covid highlights with hedges, boosters and self‐mention particularly marked. Our study offers both a description of stance in highlights and an understanding of the potential impact of the intense, high‐stakes competition generated by the pandemic in biomedical publishing. We believe this offers a valuable contribution to the literature on stance, academic discourse and rhetorical persuasion.
... This social aspect of critical stance is consistent with the argument that academic discourses vary according to disciplines (e.g., Charles, 2007). Studies have revealed that this variation is reflected in the linguistic and discourse resources that writers use to construct critical stance in disciplinary writing (e.g., Charles, 2007;Jiang & Hyland, 2015;Hyland, 1999Hyland, , 2000Lancaster, 2012. These studies have shown that the use of linguistic and discourse markers of critical stance varies along disciplinary lines. ...
... The linguistic and discourse markers of critical stance that are identified in these studies include boosters (e.g., of course), hedges (e.g., perhaps), self-mention (e.g., I, we), attitudes markers (e.g., surprisingly), disclaimer markers (e.g., although, but), etc. For example, Hyland (1999) has found that writers in humanities/social sciences use more expression of stance than those in sciences and engineering. Other studies have shown that the use of stance markers varies along the line of sub-disciplines. ...
Critical stance is one of the most important expectations of students writing in disciplines in different educational contexts including India, UK, USA, etc. However, students face challenges construing criticality in academic texts. These challenges may result from students’ lack of understanding of how critical stance is linguistically constructed in academic texts- academic essays, research papers, etc. These challenges may also result from teachers’ difficulties pinpointing to students how criticality is linguistically realized in disciplinary writing. In this regard, this study examines critical stance in successful essay assignments by postgraduate students majoring in English studies at universities in Gujarat state in India. It analyzes the extent to which the qualities of criticality in these assignments are approximate to the qualities of critical stance in successful literary analyses by upper-level university students writing in English as a first language.
The data in this study include academic essay assignments written by postgraduate students as part of formative assessment in the department of English and academic essay assignments from BAWE corpus. The data also include interview and questionnaire administered to postgraduate students at seven universities in Gujarat state in India. To examine critical stance patterns in essay assignments, this study adopts a qualitative-discourse analysis research design and a quantitative-corpus linguistic research design. It draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to examine critical stance patterns in postgraduate students’ assignments. Specifically, it draws on genre theory and appraisal system from SFL to examine the type of stance in postgraduate students’ assignments and to analyze whether the qualities of critical stance in postgraduate students’ assignments are similar to the qualities of critical stance in assignments from BAWE corpus.
... Methods sections in academic articles are intended to provide a roadmap for the work conducted to produce subsequent findings. However, they are often constrained by disciplinary conventions [55,91], where empirical research is frequently evaluated based on the normative soundness of its methods [122]. In interview studiesespecially those focused beyond WEIRD contexts-the methodology sections frequently do not and cannot fully convey the complexities involved [4]. ...
Despite the growing recognition of the need for inclusive technology design, research often struggles to engage non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) populations, labeling them as "hard to reach." This paper argues that rigid, Western-centric research methods contribute to this gap, particularly in non-WEIRD contexts. Drawing on two qualitative studies of WhatsApp users in India, we highlight the challenges in the research process when attempting to apply a non-Western perspective while recruiting participants in informal and fragmented communication environments. We emphasize the need to embrace and normalize flexible, context-specific recruitment strategies that move beyond Western norms of rigor. By adopting non-WEIRD methodologies, we aim to make computing research more inclusive and accessible, especially for populations in the Global South. We challenge the notion that these groups are inherently difficult to engage, arguing instead that the difficulty stems from the continued imposition of Western-centric approaches.
... Genres are dynamic. Texts are classified depending on the genre based on social actions or their purpose ) even when they follow certain conventions (Hyland, 1999). ...
Learners’ perceived needs, preconceptions, and knowledge of their target situation influence how they proceed with their learning. Studies revealed that university students have inadequate knowledge and awareness of future English needs. Their perceived English needs may be imagined, or misguided by focusing on short-term study goals, which can be inconsistent with their future career English needs. When students incorrectly identify the skills actually required by their future jobs, they may fail to understand the relevance of their learning, resulting in diminished motivation, resistance to, or dissatisfaction with the English course. To address this issue, the study explores the impact of university students’ direct interaction with graduates/professionals on their English language learning. Questionnaires, students’ reflections, and semi-structured interviews were adopted to collect data. The results showed that the interaction helped students gain a realistic understanding of workplace needs, and provided real workplace information, which impacted the students’ choices of future career path and their ESP course motivation. The results also identified some practical issues that need to be addressed when adopting this approach. This paper concludes with pedagogical suggestions for establishing relevance in student learning, and for better preparing English major students for employability.
... As depicted in Table 2, Pharmacology authors employed indicating limitations and evaluating methodology more than their Tourism counterparts. Hence, it can be inferred that the nature of Pharmacology as a natural sciences, which rely more on the reporting of objective information (Hyland, 1999b;MacDonald, 1994), influences the frequent occurrences of these two steps. Based on a recent study by Moreno (2022) involving Spanish and English Social Science research articles, authors include limitations to create a niche for future suggestions, to show expertise by being aware of what the study is lacking, and to expect and prevent potential criticism. ...
This study investigates the move structures employed in the research discussions of articles across academic disciplines, particularly science and non-science, focusing on the dynamics that shape disciplinary conventions. Based on a comparative analysis of selected articles from two distinct fields, this study aims to uncover how researchers in these fields discuss their research results, such as by articulating their findings, engaging with existing literature, and constructing arguments within their respective contexts. Through a qualitative content analysis approach, prevalent move structures were identified in the corpora, revealing both similarities and differences in the rhetorical strategies involved. Preliminary findings indicate that while certain move structures are universally recognised, each discipline exhibited unique patterns influenced by its academic conventions and discourse communities. These insights not only enhance our understanding of academic discourse but also highlight the importance of context in shaping research communication. The current findings essentially add to the growing body of knowledge on academic and research genre by providing a nuanced perspective on how move structures function as tools for the dissemination of knowledge. The implications extend to educators and researchers alike, offering guidance on effective writing practices that resonate with disciplinary norms. Ultimately, this comparative analysis fosters greater awareness of the complexities involved in research discussions, encouraging more effective and diverse cross-disciplinary research in the future.
... Boosters are words used by writers to "express their certainty in what they say" (Hyland, 2005a(Hyland, , 2005b. Writers also use boosters to highlight shared information, group membership, and engagement with readers (Hyland, 1999). By using boosters, writers want to position themselves well within the argument. ...
Research in universities has been deemed as a key aspect in showing rigor and accountability as well as the gatekeeper for academic quality. Research writing and publication, including those composed by students, are expected to provide strong and compelling applications of knowledge in their field. This present research investigated strategies used by students in claiming importance by way of presenting stance and arguments in their research writings. Corpus for this study was 1,178 student research abstracts from undergraduate student final papers in Indonesia. Two sub-corpora were built from this corpus, consisting of English version abstracts and Indonesian original abstracts. Corpus analysis was conducted to identify the lexical use and the context of the use of rhetorical markers by analyzing frequency, clusters, concordance, and collocations in the corpus. Using AntConc 4.2.4 as the tool for corpus analysis, the investigation was focused on the strategies in using hedges and boosters to present stance and arguments. Results of this study showed students used distinctive rhetorical markers in their abstracts, including the frequent recurrence of passive verbs (7 passive verbs out of 20 verbs). Results also showed the word “ metode ” (method) was frequently used (occurring 1,079 times in the Indonesian sub-corpus) in comparison to the word “ hasil ” (result) (occurring 588 times in the sub-corpus). Students also used more hedges (24 types) than boosters (17 types), contrary to common understanding. The findings of this study indicated the strategies students used to claim importance of their research. Students were also clearly aware of the value of writing as evidence of academic achievements and adherence. The conclusion for this study demonstrated the importance of providing students with alternative routes to show rigor and quality in writing. Implications for further research and for data-driven applications in writing courses were also discussed.
... Boosters, on the other hand, express conviction and assert claims (Hyland 1999). As shown in Fig. 2, the frequency of boosters appears relatively average across the three corpora, with slightly higher occurrences observed in USLC and CLC compared to EULC. ...
Mirroring public ideologies and value systems in legislative discourse, stance not only functions as a powerful instrument for legislators to balance legal values and stakeholders’ interests but also acts as a valuable reference for individuals to understand legislative texts. This study conducts a corpus-driven analysis of stance expressions in legislative discourse. Using three self-compiled corpora that incorporate data protection laws from the United States, the European Union, and China, we apply Hyland’s stance model to contrastively analyse evidence of hedging, boosting, self-mention, and attitude markers across these jurisdictions and eventually propose a specialised research model of stance in law. This study unveils the nature of modesty and sufficient discursive space of data protection laws, as well as legislative values and public ideologies conveyed by different jurisdictions within the broader socio-legal cultural context. Besides uncovering the legal constructiveness of data protection laws, the results also suggest that the overall representation of stance in data protection legislation aligns with its performance in legislative discourse, which showcases a legislative tendency to achieve an overtly neutral appearance through covert stance expressions.
... The linguistic impact of academic writing often depends on how students use forms of words to create connections between their own claims and the claims of others using the knowledge of vocabulary (Hyland, 1999;Hunston & Thompson, 2000). The unsatisfactory use of academic vocabulary and formal vocabulary in the students' assignments and end-of-semester essays shows that the student has unhealthy dimensions (students lack knowledge of collocation, spelling, syntactic and semantic roles of words in an essay) of vocabulary knowledge for writing. ...
Writing different forms of text at different levels for responding satisfactorily to issues in the academic community is important. Thus, this paper examines the statistical differences between tertiary students’ academic writing skills in different disciplines and at three different levels. We use a quantitative approach and descriptive design to extract and analyse data comprising students’ essays from four departments of a public university in Ghana. We analyse the data using descriptive statistics and ANOVA in SPSS. The results show that there is a significant difference between students’ academic writing skills across levels within a discipline. On the contrary, there is no significant difference between students’ academic writing skills across departments. We successfully generated corpus data and analysed the same statistically which is not common in the English as a second language learning context, thereby contributing greatly to the academic environment. This paper also focused on the students’ general vocabulary knowledge as a crucial factor in their academic writing skills.
... Hyland's (2005) model of interactional metadiscourse markers accounted for the extent to which the author attempts to co-construct a text with readers. A previous taxonomy proposed by Hyland (1999Hyland ( , 2000 included self-mention markers as a category of interpersonal metadiscourse which was referred to as "person markers." Their relation with other metadiscourse categories have been addressed, but self-mention markers have not been regarded as a dependent category in other taxonomies (e.g., Crismore et al., 1993;Dafouz Milne, 2003). ...
The current study explores the use of one of the metadiscoursal features, namely self-mention markers in the method sections of research articles written by native English and L-1 Persian writers in the field of psychology. Through a comprehensive corpus-driven analysis, we observed significant disparities in the frequency and some insignificant differences in the functions of self-mentions between the two groups. Our findings underscore the value of authorial voice in academia, contributing to a deeper understanding of how authorial identity is constructed within different linguistic and cultural contexts in psychology research articles. The implications of this study extend to both novice and expert researchers in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Understanding the specific conventions of authorial identity can empower writers to assert their voice effectively in academic discourse for writing a more successful academic writing (Hyland, 2002).
... In this case, the author of the academic discourse uses "we" to guide readers to better accept their views and guide readers to enter the research step by step. In Example 4, "we" is used to explain the research process [9]. In this way, the reader can better understand the ideas put forward by the author in his/her study of academic discourse. ...
The personal pronoun “we” is the most frequently-used self-mention language of the author’s presentation in academic discourse. This study adopts quantitative and qualitative designs, selecting 60 English academic discourses from the Linguistics Journal of The Modern Language Journal and the Economics Journal of The Journal of Finance as samples to build two corpora. With the help of Antconc and Log-likelihood and Chi-Square Calculator 1.0, the present study analyzes the semantic use of the self-mention “we” in the corpus. The finding shows that there are significant differences in the use of “we” between the academic discourse of the two disciplines from the perspective of between disciplines (p < 0.001), and the use of “we” is more frequent in the economic academic discourse. From the perspective of within disciplines, the use of “exclusive we” is more frequent and there is a significant difference in the use of “inclusive we” and “exclusive we” in the academic discourse of the two disciplines. Finally, the study also analyzes the textual function of “we” in academic discourse, intending to provide some help to the understanding and writing of academic discourse in different disciplines, especially Linguistics and Economics.
... Based on a corpus of 240 doctoral and master's dissertations by Hong Kong students, Hyland examines the purpose and distribution of the metadiscourse. His analysis suggests how academic writers use metadiscourse to offer a credible representation of themselves and their work in different fields [15]. As for the cross-language investigation, Joseph Lee and Elliott Casal investigate the cross-linguistic variation of metadiscourse in the results and discussion sections of engineering master's theses written in English and Spanish. ...
This study provides a comparative corpus-based analysis of interactional metadiscourse between Chinese scholars and English native speakers’ conclusion section of aerospace research articles. For this purpose, based on Hyland’s (2005) interactional metadiscourse taxonomy, 52 aerospace conclusions writing pieces from two high-profile journals were selected for analysis. Results indicate that the discrepancy in total number and frequency lies in the use of hedges, boosters, and attitude markers. Linguistic features, sociocultural factors, and rhetoric functions are responsible for these discrepancies. This work may shed lights on academic writing and pedagogy.
... Other researchers investigate disciplinary variation in the distribution of linguistic and discourse resources which construe critical stance. For example, Hyland (1999) has found that writers in humanities/social sciences use more expression of stance than those in sciences and engineering. Lancaster (2016) has found that writers in economics use more stance markers than those in political sciences. ...
There has been a debate over the use of genre-based pedagogy to develop university students’ ability to create valued meaning in academic writing. Some researchers support an implicit genre-based instruction while others support an explicit genre-based instruction. However, few empirical studies move beyond this debate to investigate the effectiveness of genre-based approach to developing university students’ academic writing skills. Therefore, this study investigates the impact of genre-based pedagogy in developing MBA students’ ability to construe critical stance in their writing. The data consisted of 28219 words corpus of 40 essay assignments, collected pre-genre-based course and post-genre-based course. Using Hyland’ s (2005) model of intersubjective positioning and Martin and White’s (2005) theory of evaluation in discourse, the data were analyzed for the distribution of hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and disclaim markers through manual coding using UAM corpus tool. The results showed a significant decrease in the use of key linguistic resources that function to make a text informal. In addition, the results showed a less significant increase and a less significant decrease in the use of key linguistic resources that function to construe critical stance in academic writing. These results have implication for the use of genre-based pedagogy in developing students’ ability to create valued meaning in academic writing. They show the extent to which genre-based pedagogy, implemented at the beginning or during subject learning, impacts students’ academic writing skills.
... It was Harris who first coined the term metadiscourse in the 1950s (Hyland, 2014). Three decades later, attention was paid to this pragmatic feature by some researchers (e.g., Williams, 1981;Kopple, 1985;Crismore, 1989). ...
A considerable body of research has investigated the use of metadiscourse in academic writing in different languages, and it is assumed in the literature that the use of metadiscourse is language- and culture-specific. However, little research has investigated how Arab writers interact with their readers in Arabic research articles (RAs). Thus, following Hyland’s (2005) models, this study explores the use of the interactional metadiscourse in the introductions of 94 Arabic RAs totalling 88,350 words published between 2013-2022. Findings showed that Arab writers tend to establish a relationship with readers and involve them as discourse participants through the use of the inclusive pronoun naḥnu نحن ‘we’ and the rhetorical forms. Arab writers used both grammatical and lexical items to express their views with confidence with a high degree of commitment. They were found to use reader-accuracy markers to mitigate their arguments. They, however, appeared not to evaluate what is presented through their personal feelings, and this might be due to sociocultural reasons, which requires further investigation.
Background: Motivated by the growing interest in the impact of study abroad programs on language development, the present research addresses a gap in the literature by examining the often-overlooked role of metadiscourse markers in writing. Purpose: The study explores the impact of study abroad on the use of attitude markers, boosters, and hedges in the L2 English academic writing of international students. Method: Using a pre-test post-test within-subject design, we analysed essays written by students before and after a semester abroad to map the characteristics of their interactional metadiscourse style and assess changes in their use of these markers. Results: The findings show a significant increase in hedges post-study abroad, indicating a shift towards a more cautious and nuanced writing style. However, no statistically significant changes were observed for attitude markers and boosters. The overall range of interactional metadiscourse markers remained limited, occasionally making lexical choices more typical of informal language rather than academic written discourse. Conclusion: While study abroad may enhance certain aspects of language use, targeted pedagogical interventions are needed to improve academic writing. Emphasizing interactional metadiscourse markers could help students develop a more sophisticated written style, better suited to academic contexts. This research contributes to both pragmatics and study abroad literature. In pragmatics, it expands existing knowledge on the writing styles of novice academic writers, particularly by identifying potential areas for improvement related to the use of metadiscourse markers. Simultaneously, it advances study abroad literature by introducing metadiscourse as a critical, yet previously underexplored indicator of writing quality. By highlighting the importance of these linguistic features, this study opens new avenues for both theoretical inquiry and practical applications in enhancing the academic writing skills of international students.
In this study, we investigate the underexplored rhetorical practice of authors adopting English as a lingua franca (ELF) in academic writing, focusing on their use of exemplification. By giving examples for illustration or clarification, the act of exemplifying is central to the clarity and persuasiveness of research writing. We examined it through a local grammar approach, analysing both its lexico-grammatical and discourse-semantic patterns. Based on the SciELF corpus, which comprises unproofread pre-submission drafts of ELF authors, our analysis shows that for example and “Exemplified – Indicator – Exemplification – Subordinate Category” are the dominant marker and local grammar pattern of exemplification. The use of exemplification also relates to the L1 background, professional status and disciplinary alignment of the ELF authors. Czech and Russian authors made the most and least frequent use of exemplification respectively while Finnish and Czech authors often use variant patterns of the dominant one. Additionally, senior academics, particularly from soft disciplines, make the most of exemplificatory markers and prefer the “Exemplified – Indicator – Exemplification – Relevant Studies” pattern. Our study sheds light on the rhetorical language use by ELF authors, and unravels the value of local grammars in the research of English as an academic lingua franca.
This paper examines authorial presence in late-Modern English scientific writing through a study of second-person pronouns in the chet (History texts) and cec he t (Chemistry texts) sub-corpora of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. Although existing studies in this area have tended to focus on self-mentions ( Hyland 2001 , 2008 ; Flowerdew and Ho Wang 2015 ; Moskowich 2020 ; Suau-Jiménez 2020 ), I will argue that second-person pronominal forms can also reflect and underline more broadly the author’s voice through direct interaction with the readership ( Ivanić and Camps 2001 ; Matsuda and Tardy 2007 ), especially in terms of dialogic you . This interaction is seen in the use of you forms and the possible functions that these perform, according to period, discipline, socio-external factors, and the sex of the author. Whereas observing the data from these diverse perspectives can yield differing, partial results, it can be argued that, when taken together, such elements can lead to a far more accurate picture of an author’s voice. The analysis presented here is an attempt to confirm that this is indeed the case.
Writing a good discussion section is crucial as how the section is written contributes to the acceptance of a research article (RA) by the reader. Through a move structure model for the Discussion section of RAs and the taxonomies of hedges and boosters, the study examines communicative strategies, namely move structures (move and step) as well as the metadiscoursal devices (hedges and boosters) used by Tourism and Pharmacology authors to discuss research results in Tourism and Pharmacology RA discussions. Thus, in the current study, the Discussion sections of 20 Tourism RAs and 20 Pharmacology RAs were analysed using a mixed method comprising both the qualitative and quantitative analyses. In the qualitative method, a content analysis was used to identify the communicative strategies in terms of rhetorical ‘moves’ and ‘steps’ as well as hedges and boosters employed in the selected RA discussions. In addition, a semi-structured interview was conducted with specialist informants to obtain further insight for the present findings. On the other hand, in the quantitative method, data was quantified in terms of the number of sentences employing the moves/steps and the frequencies of hedges and boosters found in the corpora. The findings show that authors of Tourism and Pharmacology RAs tend to report and comment on their research findings in a reciprocally connected manner. However, a major difference was observed in terms of how the findings were commented on. Besides, both the Tourism and Pharmacology authors were also found to utilise hedges more frequently than boosters to avoid overclaiming their results. The findings of this study can help future academic authors and students to employ effective communicative strategies to discuss research results along with the appropriate use of hedges and boosters.
While there is considerable research on the ways in which authors of English academic texts refer to the exist-ing literature, especially in research articles, scholarly interest in the linguistic patterns of academic citation in Polish remains very limited. Therefore, the present study examines how previous literature is reported in Polish research articles representing five disciplines classified as “soft” sciences, i.e. psychology, philosophy, economics, linguistics and literary studies. Focusing on both formal and semantic aspects of references to previous work, the present study uses a corpus of 50 research articles from 10 academic journals to demonstrate substantial cross-disciplinary variation, some of which accords with the existing evidence that has been marshalled in this regard for English. The findings confirm the existence of differing discoursal conventions used to construct knowledge and establish scholarly credibility in different academic disciplines.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government used TV press briefings, involving government ministers as well as scientific and medical experts to update the public on the spread of the virus, advances in understanding the disease, and preventive measures. These briefings provide a valuable linguistic resource to study how science is disseminated and used by scientists and politicians in emergency risk communication. To this end, a corpus has been compiled, consisting of transcripts of 150 briefings of approximately 100 h, with a total of 996,040 words. This study uses text dispersion keyness to derive keywords that characterize the discourse of scientists and politicians, respectively. Focusing on stance markers, the study reveals different rhetorical strategies for persuasion used by the two parties in public health emergency communication. Specifically, the scientists employ cautious reasoning and restrained confidence, while the ministers use a war-on-coronavirus narrative with unrestrained confidence, in the framing of the disease and scientific development.
The paper tests conversational Large Language Models, instructed to produce stance expression types (affective, relational, epistemic, and moral) and their contexts in Opinion (Speech) Events (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara, Chaya Liebeskind, Anna Baczkowska, Jurate Ruzaite, Ardita Dylgjeri, Ledia Kazazi & Erika Lombart 2023. Opinion events: Types and opinion markers in English social media discourse. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 19(2). 447–481). In the first part an opinion taxonomy proposed in (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara, Chaya Liebeskind, Anna Baczkowska, Jurate Ruzaite, Ardita Dylgjeri, Ledia Kazazi & Erika Lombart 2023. Opinion events: Types and opinion markers in English social media discourse. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 19(2). 447–481) is discussed in terms of Explicit (direct or indirect) and Implicit opinionated texts, categorized as positive, negative, ambiguous, or balanced. The further part discusses our previous attempts at Explicit (direct/indirect) and Implicit opinion type generation, performed by means of a series of prompts with LLMs (ChatGPT and Gemini) (Liebeskind, Chaya & Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk. 2024a. Opinion identification using a conversational large language model. In FLAIRS conference Proceedings . Florida, Liebeskind, Chaya & Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk. F 2024b. Navigating opinion space: A Study of explicit and implicit opinion generation in language models . Santiago de Compostella: EAIS conference publication), while this paper presents further LLM experiments with chatGPT and Gemini as well as their results, based on the analysis of stance expression types , which lead to increased success in opinion context generation.
Writing an abstract is a challenging assignment for graduate students as it requires condensing all the extensive research into a few sentences, providing sufficient background knowledge, and presenting findings compellingly to the academic community. This study observes how graduate engineering students cope with writing their abstracts for their first published papers, with a specific focus on metadiscourse. The study is based on the learner corpus of 1,746 abstracts (117,535 words) written by non-native English speakers in English and Serbian during their Master’s studies. The research follows Hyland’s taxonomy, focusing on interactive frame markers and interactional engagement markers, together with metadiscursive nouns in order to uncover cross-linguistic patterns and pedagogical implications. The comparison of the absolute and relative frequency with statistical significance and log likelihood between Serbian and English sub-corpora demonstrates that students tend to use frame markers with greater frequency in Serbian abstracts than in English ones. Additionally, engagement markers, and especially directives, are used twice as often as frame markers in both sub-corpora, with a higher prevalence in English abstracts. Following the qualitative and quantitative analyses, the findings offer pedagogical implications related to the range of frame markers and metadiscursive nouns used by students to introduce their research aims and the range of engagement markers used to engage readers in their research and thus claim their credibility in academic writing.
This study investigates the use of attitude markers in qualitative and quantitative research articles by the use of corpus and genre analysis. In the first part of the study, the Discussion sections of 100 qualitative and 100 quantitative research articles published in five high impact journals from 2003-2009 in the field of Applied Linguistics were analysysed using WordPilot2002. The analysis showed that attitude markers appeared with similar frequency in both sub-corpora. Categorizing the attitude markers revealed that the two main categories used were adverbs and adjectives. In the second part, in order to identify in which parts of the Discussion section each of these stance features were clustered in, this feature was investigated in various moves of the Discussion sections of 10 qualitative and 10 quantitative research articles.The findings contribute to our understanding of research articles, and also have implications for pedagogy regarding the writing instruction to ESP students who are writing dissertations and research papers.
ادوات الربط النصيه هي وسائل لتنظيم المعلومات ولخلق تواصل مع القراء. عادةً عندما يكتب الطلاب يتمحور تركيزهم على نوع واحد من انواع ادوات الربط النصيه وهو النوع المخصص لتنظيم المعلومات ويهملون النوع الاخر الذي يسهم بمشاركة القراء. بمعنى اخر انهم يركزون فقط على عرض وترتيب المعلومات. ولهذا تهدف هذه الدراسه الى تخطي هذة الصعوبه من خلال اختيار الباحثات لثمانية عشر خلاصه, تسع منها قد كتبت بواسطة الطلاب العراقيون والبقيه لطلاب الامريكيين. اهداف هذه الدراسه هو تقصي ومقارنة ادوات الربط النصيه بأنواعها وفروعها للطلاب الامريكيين والعراقيين وكذلك دراسة و مقارنة أثر أدوات الربط النصية المستخدمة في تنظيم وربط المعلومات ومشاركة القراء. ولتحقيق هذه الاهداف اعتمدن الباحثات على النموذج التحليلي لهيلند (2005). النتائج تظهر ان كل من الطلاب العراقيين والامريكيين يستخدمون ادوات ربط وتنظيم النص اكثر من استخدام ادوات مشاركة القراء ولكن كان استخدام الطلاب الامريكيين لادوات مشاركة القراء اعلى بالمقارنه مع نظرائهم. الطلاب العراقيون لم يكونوا قادرين على مشاركة القراء بسبب قلة اسخدامهم للادوات المخصصه لهذا الغرض بينما تمكن الطلاب الامريكيون من مشاركة القراء من خلال التنوع بأستخدام ادوات مشاركة القراء. تبعاً لذلك الباحثات يوصن بما يلي: انهُ من الضروري التركيزعلى ادوات الربط النصيه ضمن حصص الدراسات العليا, وعلى كل من اساتذة واستاذات الكليات لطلاب المرحلة الرابعه ايلاء اهتمام اكثر بهذا الموضوع لما له من اهميه بمساعدة طلبة الكليات بأعداد بحوثهم بشكل اكثر وضوحاً, وكذلك ضرورة تدريس هذا الموضوع ضمن حصة كيفية كتابة المقاله.
While language remains a constant channel of communication, visual information also plays a significant role in contemporary communication. This study explores the application of interactional metadiscourse and meaning-making in public health posters issued during the COVID-19 crisis. It examines both the textual and visual communicative strategies adopted in the multimodal texts of 60 COVID-19 posters published on the official websites of the World Health Organization and the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia. Principally, the study is framed within the theories of interactional metadiscourse by Hyland (2005b) and multimodality by Kress and van Leeuwen ( 1996 / 2006 / 2010), as investigated through their work on visual grammar. The frequency and functions of interactional metadiscourse resources and socio-semiotic resources were scrutinized and analyzed. The findings reveal that reader pronouns and directives were the most frequently used interactional metadiscourse to explicitly engage the target audience and guide them toward physical acts that maintain the application of health-protective procedures. The results further demonstrate that framing, salience, and images were the socio-semiotic resources most commonly utilized to achieve compositional meaning, explain content visually, and make information more readily comprehensible to the public.
In academia, the assessment of scholarly works is conducted through diverse evaluative genres, each characterized by genre-specific linguistic features. This study adopts a corpus-assisted approach to compare how stance-taking strategies are employed in the contexts of manuscript reviews and doctoral defense sessions, with particular attention to the contributions of Iranian researchers. Following Hyland’s (2005) interactional model, both datasets are examined to identify stance-taking strategies, including self-mentions, boosters, hedges, and attitude markers. The study unveils genre-specific norms in reviewers’ and examiners’ approaches to self-representation, epistemic perspectives, and attitudinal orientations, revealing commonalities and variations in their usage. These linguistic nuances are discussed in terms of the interpersonal relationships between evaluators and their audiences, a crucial factor shaping the landscape of scholarly assessment in these genres. The findings contribute to the literature on stance and deepen our understanding of genre-specific aspects in oral and written academic evaluative contexts. Incorporating these insights into the instruction of English for research writing can assist junior researchers in effectively responding to criticisms during thesis examinations or manuscript reviews, thereby enhancing their prospects of earning recognition in their disciplinary community.
Debates around the efficacy and dangers of vaccination have taken on critical importance with the Covid pandemic and WHO naming vaccine hesitancy as a major global health threat. We explore how writers use two types of blog, academic and journalistic, to promote key public health messages around the effectiveness and necessity of Covid-19 vaccinations to a broad, heterogeneous audience. Examining 120 Covid-19 vaccination themed posts from reputable news and academic blog sites, we compare the different ways writers present a stance and take a position towards vaccines and vaccinations in these different interactional contexts. Findings show that both types of bloggers are clearly aware of the need to convey a stance towards their topic and audiences feel entitled to position themselves in relation to vaccination issues, but with different emphases. The study has important implications for how healthcare information is disseminated and persuasion accomplished in these public arenas of discourse.
This chapter explores the challenges experienced by second-year journalism students in developing academic argument in a data visualisation course. The course focused on representing arguments that drew on aspects of educational inequality in Cape Town. Data is increasingly produced and circulated visually; and the means to generate data visualisations are becoming increasingly accessible. It is thus important to develop critical tools to engage with these kinds of texts. The chapter describes the principles for learning design that were employed to improve the blended-learning course into one that better supported students’ development as critical designers and engaged citizens. Some of the principles included delimiting the scope of the task, encouraging the use of readily accessible design tools, introducing a process approach, developing meta-languages of critique, and acknowledging different audiences. The chapter ends by analysing the work of two students in light of these learning design principles. We discuss some of the gains and losses of moving from one digital format to another (PowerPoint to poster), the ways in which students adapt texts to different audiences and platforms, and the emergence of a meta-level critique of the data sources.
The extent of authorial intervention in research writing is partly a personal expression of individuality but largely an attempt to demonstrate disciplinary affiliation and attain disciplinary recognition in the form of publication and citation. To reach this goal, writers draw upon discourse practices and rhetorical patterns that circulate within the discourse community. Using Hyland's model of interaction in academic discourse, the present study explores patterns of personal and interpersonal intrusion (aka stance and engagement) in abstracts of research article by stylisticians. The objective is to examine whether stylisticians' textual and rhetorical choices intersect more with the disciplinary practices of the soft or hard disciplines. To this end, I use the LancsBox corpus analysis tool to compile a corpus of 181 research article abstracts drawn from the Language and Literature journal, which publishes theoretical and empirical research in stylistics, and search for frequencies of stance markers and engagement features in the corpus. Findings from the corpus-assisted analysis are set against frequent patterns of academic interaction in the soft and hard disciplines in order to determine if stylistics can be claimed to be a hard science.
This study explores the rhetorical strategies employed in topic generalizations of increasing specificity in the introductions from the leading peer-reviewed journals. Specifically, we identified the substeps in Move1-Step1, which show how the writers promote the significance of the research area. The qualitative approach enabled us to distinguish eight substeps provisionally outlining the common patterning of the discourse and to analyze the linguistic choices enhancing the persuasiveness of claims. Citation, attitude markers, boosters and hedges have been found the most effective devices for preserving balance between assertion and concession. The quantitative analysis of the texts defined the frequency rate of the substeps discerned including their total sum of occurrences and percentages per introduction. The substep level analysis has contributed to scrutinizing the subtle communicative functions of the rhetorical strategies in the textual structure.
The communicative features of academic discourse have been explored from different perspectives. However, these studies have been predominantly carried out on English-language material. Little is known of how rhetorical elements, including stancetaking markers, are used in Russian academic prose. The сurrent study assumed that in order to ensure effective communication academic writers use a repertoire of stancetaking features. The theoretical basis of the study is Hyland’s model of stance markers which is frequently used in studying interactional strategies found in academic discourse. As research material the articles by Russian engineering scholars derived from six academic journals were used. The analysis revealed a large number of stance items with a predominance of boosters in the article introductions selected to build the corpus. It is suggested that the differences in the employment of stance markers identified in the study reflect discipline-specific writing peculiarities of the engineering academic community, while the discursive choices made by engineering writers are constrained by discursive conventions and depend on the level of the writers’ language proficiency. Despite some data limitations, the research results can be seen as a starting point for the future research of stancetaking in Russian research articles from different perspectives.
This article explores self-mention in L2 (Czech) learner academic discourse along three dimensions of analysis: realisation, authorial roles and distribution across the rhetorical sections of English-medium master’s theses in the field of humanities. While extending the scope of self-mention to cover pronominal and nominals forms, the aim of the study is to find out how Czech graduates combine pronominal and nominal forms of self-mention to modulate the degree of visibility and authority they convey in their texts. The contrastive corpus-based investigation compares a corpus of Czech graduates’ master’s theses to two reference L1 corpora representing learner and published academic discourse to examine differences pertaining to variation along the culture and expertise dimensions. The findings indicate that realisation patterns of self-mention and preferences for specific authorial roles vary significantly across the corpora. Czech graduates tend to be reluctant to display a high degree of visibility and authority and prefer to adopt a stance of humility in their English-medium master’s theses. The paper argues that this is motivated by the efforts of students to blend the L1 and L2 academic conventions, their lower level of rhetorical maturity and the audience the students address in the examination context of the master’s thesis.
The study explores the Pakistani business newspaper corpus for the presence of engagement features—one of the systems of interactional metadiscourse. Business corpus of 1 million words comprised Pakistani business news and business articles collected from the four well-reputed Pakistani English newspapers, i.e., The Daily Times, The Nation, The Business Recorder, and The Dawn. It was found that the writer presents his ideas and arguments and engages his/her reader by employing different engagement features Furthermore, in the corpus of business articles, the writers were found keener to be informative and engaging than they were for the corpus of business news. The results of the study can potentially help future researchers in understanding the use of Engagement markers in other business corpus texts. In addition, educationists and syllabus designers may use the findings of the study for developing better teaching materials.
Corpora and Rhetorically Informed Text Analysis explores applications of rhetorically informed approaches to corpus research. Bringing together contributions from scholars in a variety of fields, it takes up questions of how theories and traditions in rhetorical analysis can be integrated with corpus techniques in order to enrich our understanding of language use, variation, and history. The studies included in this volume shed light on areas as diverse as student academic writing, political discourse, and the digital humanities. These studies all make use of a dictionary-based tagger called DocuScope, which recognizes tens-of-millions of words and phrases and slots them into categories based on their rhetorical functions. While DocuScope provides a through-line that both links the studies’ various analytical procedures and primes their rhetorical insights, the volume is about more than the explanatory power of a single tool. It demonstrates how rhetorically informed approaches can complement more established corpus methodologies, underscoring their combined potential.
It requires particular approaches to produce a qualified academic writing since it is a basis of understanding, representing the quality of the writer’s thinking and potential ideas. This study was conducted to investigate the experiences of two Indonesian students taking a Master’s degree at the University of Adelaide, in constructing academic writing. Interview, to give an ethnographic perspective, was used in this study and the participants were asked with seven open-ended questions. The findings showed that, the students identified second language difficulties with regard to writing in general (grammatical and orthographic category), and difficulties with understanding the readings, and translating that into critical analysis to support argumentation. English as a foreign language (EFL) educational background was another issue to appear during the interview in relation to their obscurities in constructing the writing academically. Peer review, furthermore, also played a significant role to help them produce a better writing through proofreading.
Bu çalışmanın amacı Türkçe fen bilimleri (FB) ve sosyal bilimler (SB) makale özetlerinde kullanılan alıcı odaklı etkileşimli üstsöylem (AOEÜ) belirleyicilerini incelemektir. Bu amaç doğrultusunda TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM Dergipark’a kayıtlı hakemli dergilerde Ocak 2013 – Aralık 2017 yılları arasında yayımlanmış 289 Türkçe makalenin Türkçe yazılmış özetinden oluşan bir veri tabanı oluşturulmuştur. Çalışma için oluşturulan bu veri tabanı toplamda 36.152 sözcük içermektedir. Veri tabanındaki makale özetleri, Hyland ve Tse’nin (2004) geliştirdikleri ve Hyland’ın (2005) son biçimini verdiği üstsöylem sınıflandırmasındaki AOEÜ boyutu temel alınarak incelenmiş ve hem alanlar arasında hem de alanlar içinde karşılaştırılmıştır. Çalışmada incelenen verilerden ortaya çıkan bulgulara göre; FB ve SB makale özetlerinde kullanım sıklığı en yüksek olan AOEÜ belirleyicisi vurgulayıcılardır. Bunun yanı sıra en az karşılaşılan AOEÜ belirleyicilerinin katılım belirleyicisi ve kendinden söz etme belirleyicisi olduğu, SB makale özetlerinde FB özetlerinden daha fazla üstsöylem belirleyicisinin kullanıldığı, hem fen bilimlerinin hem de sosyal bilimlerin alt alanları içinde üstsöylem kullanım sıklığı ve kullanılan belirleyicilerdeki eğilim konusunda farkılıklar bulunduğu ortaya çıkarılmıştır. Çalışmanın bulguları birlikte değerlendirildiğinde; alanların (hem FB ve SB hem de çalışmada incelenen alt alanlar) olası okurlarını yönlendirmede en sık ve en az sıklıkta kullandığı belirleyiciler yönünden birtakım benzer görünümlere sahip olduğu, bunun yanında üstsöylemin diğer kategorilerinde birbirinden farklı seçimlere başvurduğu ayrıca bu seçimlerin de farklı kullanım sıklıklarına sahip olduğu sonucuna ulaşılmıştır.
There have been numerous investigations in recent years into the linguistic and rhetorical features of research articles,
but none, to our knowledge, has examined the ‘fringe phenomenon’ of imperatives This study investigates the use of imperatives
in research articles from ten disciplines Five articles in each field, all five from one journal, were scanned for imperative
uses in both main text and notes, and instances were collated and analysed In fields where imperatives were present in the
main text (five out of ten), we recorded interviews with the authors of one of the articles Results show that main-text imperatives
tend to congregate in sections where the principal argumentation occurs, but are very unevenly distributed across fields The
interview data also reveals that, despite the potentially face-threatening nature of imperatives, authors use them for vanous
strategic purposes such as engaging the reader, achieving text economy, or manifesting personal style Finally, there appear
to be a number of field-specific expectations and conventions Given these subtleties, a case can be made for rather more sophisticated
materials for NNS researchers and students than currently available
Performed multidimensional scaling on scholars' judgments about the similarities of the subject-matter of different academic areas. 168 university scholars made judgments about 36 areas, and 54 small-college scholars judged similarities among 30 areas. G. A. Miller's method of sorting was used in collecting data. 3 dimensions were common to the solutions of both samples: existence of a paradigm, concern with application, and concern with life systems. It appears that these dimensions are general to the subject-matter of most academic institutions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Writing is crucial to the academic world. It is the main mode of communication among scientists and scholars and also a means for students for obtaining their degrees. The papers in this volume highlight the intercultural, generic and textual complexities of academic writing. Comparisons are made between various traditions of academic writing in different cultures and contexts and the studies combine linguistic analyses with analyses of the social settings in which academic writing takes place and is acquired. The common denominator for the papers is writing in English and attention is given to native-English writers and non-native writers problems in different disciplines. The articles in the book introduce a variety of methodological approaches for analyses and search for better teaching methods and ways of improving the syllabi of writing curricula. The book as a whole illustrates how linguists strive for new research methods and practical applications in applied linguistics.
List of photographs Foreword by Shirley Brice Heath Acknowledgements 1. To know a language 2. Methodology 3. Introduction to Samoan language usage: grammar and register 4. The social contexts of childhood: village and household organisation 5. Ergative case marking: variation and acquisition 6. Word-order strategies: the two-constituent bias 7. Clarification 8. Affect, social control and the Samoan child 9. The linguistic expression of affect 10. Literacy instruction in a Samoan village 11. Language as a symbol and tool Appendix I. Transcription conventions Appendix II. Canonical transitive verb types in children's speech References Index.
Sex, politeness and language: Sex and language, What is politeness?, Why do women and men interact differently?, Analysing linguistic politeness, Social dimensions and linguistic analysis, Cross-cultural contrasts, What's in store Who speaks here? Interacting politely: Who's got the floor?, Who's asking questions?, Who's interrupting and why?, Back-channeling - a female speciality?, Agreeable and disagreeable responses, Conclusion Soft and low-hedges and boosters as politeness devices: Hedges and boosters, Hedges and boosters and 'women's language, Tag questions, Pragmatic particles- you know, I think, sort of, of course, The pragmatic tag eh, A prosodic hedge - the HRT, How typical are these politeness patterns?, Conclusion What a lovely tie! Compliments and positive politeness strategies: Paying compliments, Who pays most compliments?, How do women and men pay compliments?, What do women and men compliment each other about?, Can a compliment be a power play?, Compliment responses, What about other speech acts?, Conclusion Sorry! Apologies and negative politeness strategies: Why apologise?, Who apologises most, How do women and men apologise?, What deserves an apology?, Offending the boss is a serious matter, Friends and forgiveness, How do people respond to an apology?, Why apologise? Some answers, Speech acts and politeness - what next? Why politeness matters: Patterns of politeness, Being polite in class, Peer interaction in professional contexts, Strategies for change, Conclusion.
Writing matters: it plays a key role in the circulation of ideas in society and has a direct impact on the development of democracy. But only a few get to do the kind of writing that most influence this development. The Politics of Writing examines writing as a social practice. The authors draw on critical linguistics, cultural studies and literacy studies, as they explore and analyse: * the social context in which writing is embedded * the processes and practices of writing * the purposes of writing * the reader-writer relationship * issues of writer identity. They challenge current notions of 'correctness' and argue for a more democratic pedagogy as part of the answer to the inequitable distribution of the right to write.
Scitation is the online home of leading journals and conference proceedings from AIP Publishing and AIP Member Societies
Scientists give conflicting interpretations about scientific work - drawing alternatively from the contingent repertoire and the empiricist repertoire (both discourses). Contingent, which is more common in interviews and informal talk, calls attention to the personal battles, mistakes, disagreements of scientific work and is very flexible, vague, and imprecise. Empiricist, which is more common in articles and publications, emphasizes the impersonality of scientific work. Discourse is context-dependant.
Metadiscourse refers to writers' discourse about their discourse—their directions for how readers should read, react to, and evaluate what they have written about the subject matter. In this study the authors divided metadiscourse into textual metadiscourse (text markers and interpretive markers) and interpersonal metadiscourse (hedges, certainty markers, attributors, attitude markers, and commentary). The purpose was to investigate cultural and gender variations in the use of metadiscourse in the United States and Finland by asking whether U.S. and Finnish writers use the same amounts and types and whether gender makes any difference. The analyses revealed that students in both countries used all categories and subcategories, but that there were some cultural and gender differences in the amounts and types used. Finnish students and male students used more metadiscourse than U.S. students and female students. Students in both countries used much more interpersonal than textual metadiscourse with Finnish males using the most and U.S. males the least. The study provides partial evidence for the universality of metadiscourse and suggests the need for more cross-cultural studies of its use and/or more attention to it in teaching composition.
In this paper I explore the ways in which academic citation practices contribute to the construction of disciplinary knowledge. Based on the analysis of a computer corpus of 80 research articles and interviews with experienced writers, the study investigates the contextual variability of citations in eight disciplines and suggests how textual conventions point to distinctions in the ways knowledge is typically negotiated and confirmed within different academic communities. Clear disciplinary differences are identified in both the extent to which writers refer to the work of others and in how they depict the reported information. Writers in the humanities and social sciences employed substantially more citations than scientists and engineers, and were more likely to use integral structures, to employ discourse reporting verbs, and to represent cited authors as adopting a stance to their material. It is argued that these differences in citation practices are related to the fact that academics actively participate in knowledge construction as members of professional groups and that their discoursal decisions are influenced by, and deeply embedded in, the epistemological and social conventions of their disciplines.
Learning to express doubt and certainty in English is a complex task, but an important one since epistemic devices also function pragmatically as politeness markers. Those preparing materials or writing textbooks for the ESL learner must decide which epistemic devices to include. Information on the range and frequency of such devices in naturally occurring speech and writing can provide a basis for the necessary selection. This paper provides some data on the relative frequencies of a wide variety of lexical items expressing doubt and certainty in written and spoken corpuses, and uses the data to evaluate the adequacy of some well-known ESL textbooks.
This paper explores the possible role of university textbooks in students acquisition ofa specialised disciplinary literacy, focusing on the use of metadiscourse as a manifestation of thewriters linguistic and rhetorical presence in a text. Because metadiscourse can be analysedindependently of propositional matter, it provides useful information about how writers supporttheir arguments and build a relationship with readers in different rhetorical contexts. The papercompares features in extracts from 21 textbooks in microbiology, marketing and appliedlinguistics with a similar corpus of research articles and shows that the ways textbook authorsrepresent themselves, organise their arguments, and signal their attitudes to both their statementsand their readers differ markedly in the two corpora. It is suggested that these differences meanthat textbooks provide limited rhetorical guidance to students seeking information from researchsources or learning appropriate forms of written argument. Finally, by investigatingmetadiscourse in particular disciplines and genres, the study helps to restore the intrinsic linkbetween metadiscourse and its associated rhetorical contexts and rectify a popular view whichimplicitly characterises it as an independent stylistic device.
Hedging is a well-documented feature of spoken discourse as a result of its role in qualifying categorical commitment and facilitating discussion. Its use in academic writing has received less attention, however, and we know little about the functions it serves in different research fields and particular genres. Hedging is a significant communicative resource for academics since it both confirms the individual's professional persona and represents a critical element in the rhetorical means of gaining acceptance of claims. Hedges allow writers to anticipate possible opposition to claims by expressing statements with precision, caution, and diplomatic deference to the views of colleagues. Based on a contextual analysis of 26 articles in molecular biology, this paper argues that hedging in scientific research writing cannot be fully understood in isolation from social and institutional contexts and suggests a pragmatic framework which reflects this interpretive environment.
Scientific claims and community values: Articulating an academic culture. Language and Communication 17 (1):19-32. Scientific claims and community values: articulating an academic culture Abstract This paper explores one means by which academic texts reflect the beliefs and practices of the disciplines for which they are written. It focuses on the expression of knowledge claims in biology research articles and argues that claim mitigation incorporates important cultural assumptions. By hedging the certainty of their claims, scientists simultaneously express disciplinary values, conveying information about the nature of reality and how it should be mediated between community members. The article argues that claims help realise the work of science by embodying the values of empiricism, collegiality and competitiveness, thus providing a link between a disciplinary culture and the surface features of its texts.
Recent studies of the pragmatics of politeness have drawn on conversational data. I argue that their model can be extended to some genres of written texts. There have been two obstacles to such an extension: the lack of a definite addressee for published texts, and the dificulty of defining relevant cultural variables. Taking a corpus of articles by molecular geneticists, I assume a simple model of a two-part audience, and focus on two kinds of impositions: claims and denials of claims. With this framework, one can see politeness claims and denials of claims. With this framework, one can see politeness strategies in regularities of scientific style-such as the use of pronouns and of passives-that are usually explained in terms of conventions. The analysis also accounts for some otherwise unexplained stylistic features, such as the use of adverbs in establishing solidarity, and the use of personal attribution in hedging. With these positive and negative politeness strategies in mind, we can understand better the social significance of the occasional instances in which the writer makes an imposition without redress, or makes the imposition indirectly or chooses not to make it at all. Comparisons with popularizations, a genre in which the writer has a different kind of relation to the reader, and thus uses different kinds of politeness devices, show that these devices arise in response to the interaction embodied in the text.
The present paper identifies and describes various speech styles of English as marked by stance. By stance we mean the lexical and grammatical expression of attitudes, feelings, judgments, or commitment concerning the propositional content of a message. In an earlier paper (Biber and Finegan, 1988), we limited our investigation to the adverbial marking of stance; here we extend the analysis to include adjectival, verbal, and modal markers of stance. All occurrences of a large set of stance markers are identified in 500 texts, drawn principally from the LOB and London-Lund corpora (of written and spoken British English). The stance markers are divided into 12 categories based on semantic and grammatical criteria, and the frequency of occurrence for each category in each text is computed. The twelve categories are (1) affect markers (adverbs, verbs, and adjectives); (2) certainty adverbs; (3) certainty verbs; (4) certainty adjectives; (5) doubt adverbs; (6) doubt verbs; (7) doubt adjectives; (8) hedges; (9) emphatics; (10) possibility modals; (11) necessity modals; and (12) predictive modals. Using a statistical technique called cluster analysis, texts that are maximally similar in their exploitation of stance markers are sorted into clusters. We interpret each cluster as a stance style by consideration of the predominant stance features in the cluster, the situational characteristics of the texts constituting the cluster, and a functional analysis of individual texts. Overall, six stance styles are identified, among which are ‘Emphatic Expression of Affect’, ‘Expository Expression of Doubt’ and ‘Faceless’.
This book provides a comprehensive study of hedging in academic research papers, relating a systematic analysis of forms to a pragmatic explanation for their use. Based on a detailed examination of journal articles and interviews with research scientists, the study shows that the extensive use of possibility and tentativeness in research writing is intimately connected to the social and institutional practices of academic communities and is at the heart of how knowledge comes to be socially accredited through texts. The study identifies the major forms, functions and distribution of hedges and explores the research article genre in detail to present an explanatory framework based on a complex social and ideological interpretive environment. The results show that hedging is central to Scientific argument, individual scientists and, ultimately, to science itself. The importance of hedging to student writers is also recognised and a chapter devoted to teaching implications.
In a rapidly changing and inter-disciplinary world it is important to understand the nature and generation of knowledge, and its social organization. Increasing attention is paid in the social sciences and management studies to the constitution and claims of different theories, perspectives,and 'paradigms'. This book is one of the most respected and robust analyses of these issues. For this new paperback edition Richard Whitley - a leading figure in European business education - has written a new introduction which addresses the particular epistemological issues presented by management and business studies. He approaches the sciences as differently organized systems for theproduction and validation of knowledge - systems which become established in particular contexts and which generate different sorts of knowledge. He identifies seven major types of scientific field and discusses the establishment and growth of these sciences, including the major consequences of thenineteenth-century expansion of employment opportunities for researchers; the competitive pursuit of public reputations; and the domination of intellectual work by employees. He also examines the divergences in the way research is organized and controlled both in different fields, and in the samefield within different historical circumstances. This book will be of interest to all graduate students concerned with the social study of knowledge, science, technology, and the history and philosophy of science.
Defines personae as the imaginary and fictive being implied by and embedded in a literary or dramatic work and contends that personae are discoverable in every scientific discourse. (MH)
Hedging refers to linguistic strategies that qualify categorical commitment to express possibility rather than certainly. In scientific writing, hedging is central to effective argument: Hedging is arhetoricalmeansofgainingreaderacceptanceofclaims,allowing writers to convey their attitude to the truthof their statements and to anticipate possible objections. Because hedges allow writers to express claims with precision, caution, and modesty, they are a significant resource for academics. However, little is known about the way hedging is typically expressed in particular domains or the particular functions it serves in different genres. This article identifies the major forms, functions, and distribution of hedges in a corpus of 26 molecular biology research articles and describes the importance of hedging in this genre.
Metadiscourse refers to aspects of a text which explicitly organise the discourse, engage the audience and signal the writer's attitude. Its use by writers to guide readers and display an appropriate professional persona is an important aspect of persuasive writing. Its role in establishing and maintaining contact between the writer and the reader and between the writer and the message also makes it a central pragmatic concept. Based on a textual analysis of 28 research articles in four academic disciplines, this paper seeks to show how the appropriate use of metadiscourse crucially depends on rhetorical context. The study identifies a taxonomy of metadiscourse functions and suggests that metadiscourse reflects one way in which context and linguistic meaning are integrated to allow readers to derive intended interpretations. It is argued that metadiscourse provides writers with a means of constructing appropriate contexts and alluding to shared disciplinary assumptions. The study of academic metadiscourse can therefore offer insights into our understanding of this concept and illuminate an important dimension of rhetorical variation among disciplinary communities.
Mitigation is an interesting pragmatic concept which has attracted some attention. It can usefully be considered in relation to the more general communicative strategies for modifying the strength or force of speech acts, namely, attenuation and boosting. The effects of these strategies on positively affective and negatively affective speech acts are discussed and exemplified, and reasons for using them are considered. A range of linguistic devices which may be used to modify the illocutionary force of speech acts is described and illustrated.
This chapter outlines what tools are used in corpus linguistics (CL) and how they can be applied, then discusses the benefits of employing corpus linguistics methods in the analysis of intercultural encounters. It is argued that intercultural studies can benefit from the application of corpus methods in terms of improving rigor and reducing perceived arbitrariness, specifically through the creation and analysis of smaller specialized corpora. CL has been effectively employed in cross-cultural comparisons. There are three necessary components in CL: a researcher, the corpus data stored in electronic form on a computer, and corpus software. The chapter also discusses the compatibility of corpus methods with other methods, and examines the issue of empiricism in relation to corpus linguistics. Interview and other background data were referred to during analysis. CL is also useful in pinpointing the absence of something, which can then be discussed with the analyzed discourse community.
In Professional Academic Writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Susan Peck MacDonald tackles important and often controversial contemporary questions regarding the rhetoric of inquiry, the social construction of knowledge, and the professionalization of the academy. MacDonald argues that the academy has devoted more effort to analyzing theory and method than to analyzing its own texts. Professional texts need further attention because they not only create but are also shaped by the knowledge that is special to each discipline. Her assumption is that knowledge-making is the distinctive activity of the academy at the professional level; for that reason, it is important to examine differences in the ways the professional texts of subdisciplinary communities focus on and consolidate knowledge within their fields. Throughout the book, MacDonald stresses her conviction that academics need to do a better job of explaining their text-making axioms, clarifying their expectations of students at all levels, and monitoring their own professional practices. MacDonaldâs proposals for both textual and sentence-level analysis will help academic professionals better understand how they might improve communication within their professional communities and with their students.
This study considers the way in which medical writers talk about things which they deem to be true, possible, and untrue The
study considers research papers drawn from three leading medical journals, published since 1991 Three main types of truth
are identified contextualized truth, evidential truth, and interpreted truth These deal, respectively, with truth as the research
tradition states it to be, truth as the statistical evidence states it to be, and truth as a matter of deriving possible non-statistical
meaning from findings Writers also make frequent explicit reference to the extent to which they are committed to the propositions
expressed in statements about truth the manner in which they do so is discussed, with a distinction being drawn between propositions
and comments
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