Diachronic Analysis of Stance Markers in Research Articles’ discussion Sections

Abstract

It is now increasingly accepted that metadiscourse as one of the significant rhetorical features of research articles is context-sensitive and subject to change in response to the historically developing practices of academic communities. Motivated by such an understanding, the current research drew on a corpus of 914679 words taken from three leading journals of applied linguistics in order to trace the diachronic evolution of stance markers in discussion sections of research articles from 1996 to 2016. The analysis revealed a substantial decline in the overall frequency of stance markers in the discussion section, with devices in all categories, except self-mention which increased dramatically over the past 20 years. Approaching the interactional dimension of academic writing from such a diachronic perspective, it might be argued that academic writing reflects, and in turn constitutes, social and institutional practices derived from contexts that are continually changing. Hence, training in academic writing needs to be a process of raising students’ consciousness of the choices they can make and the consequences of making those choices in particular contexts.