Abstract
Stance in scientific writing has been a major focus of attention. However, studies on stance in the research article abstracts have been relatively scarce in Turkey compared to those in other academic prose. Abstracts contain various sections in which information on the purpose, method, results, and conclusions of the study is presented to promote the study and to attract readers’ attention. In this respect, the abstract foregrounds the main findings and serves a promotional purpose (Hyland & Tse, 2005). By comparing abstracts written by Turkish and native writers of English, this paper tries to explore how academic writers from different scientific communities construct author’s stance in research article abstracts. In particular, the present study attempts to analyze lexico-grammatical features in research article abstracts focusing specifically on stance adverbs. Stance adverbs (clearly, probably, apparently) present the attitude or assessment of the speaker/writer with respect to the proposition (Biber, 2006). The corpus consists of 240 abstracts from the disciplines of sociology, psychology, linguistics, physics, chemistry and biology. The results revealed significant differences in the total number of stance adverbs. Native writers of English employed more stance adverbs in their abstracts than Turkish writers. Differences were also found of stance adverbs in soft and hard sciences. Academic writers in the soft sciences used more stance adverbs in their abstracts. Considering variations in scientific discourse across cultures and disciplines, the results of the study may have some pedagogical implications for academic writing courses.
Highlights
Scientific discourse contains unique grammatical structures that construe scientific knowledge and reshape human experience (Halliday, 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999)
Stance adverbs are important linguistic resources employed by academic writers to interact with the reader and to indicate the degree of certainty about the presented information
This study examined stance adverbs in abstracts written by Turkish and Anglo-American academic writers to determine how academic writers constructed author stance within their scientific community
Summary
Scientific discourse contains unique grammatical structures that construe scientific knowledge and reshape human experience (Halliday, 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999). Abstracts are still defined as “an accompany” (Swales & Feak, 2009) of the RAs, it is one of the prerequisites of any RA which is to be published Given this development, this part-genre has attracted considerable attention in recent years and studies on its rhetorical structure Ventola, 1994; Melander, Swales, & Fredrickson, 1997; Hyland, 2000; Martín-Martín, 2002; Stotesbury, 2003; Martín-Martín & Burgess, 2004; Yakhontova, 2002, 2006; Van Bonn & Swales, 2007) have been carried out These studies have found that writers’ selective representation of their articles in the abstracts through various patterns of rhetorical moves is determined by how they think they can best convince others, especially members in their discipline, the value of their work, and that the general patterns of writers’ choices often vary across disciplines (Hyland, 2000)
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