Use Of Stance Markers Research Articles

Emerging engineering scholars’ stance in citations

Abstract This paper presents a mixed-method study that integrates genre-based corpus analysis and discourse-based interviews to examine the form- and stance-related citation patterns in the research articles of ten first- and second-year engineering doctoral students. The corpus analysis reveals strong preferences for stance-marked citations and the proclaim and entertain devices in particular, suggesting that writers use authorial stance to endorse cited propositions or provide likelihood- or evidence-based judgments in citations. Interview results indicate a discordance between writers’ intentions and their stance-related linguistic choices, as well as varied perceptions of authorial stance. Despite the frequent use of stance markers in citations, most writers claimed to be neutral reporters of knowledge. Only a few acknowledged their strategic stance choices and demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of the rhetorical roles citations play in their claim-making practices. The findings suggest that students with developing citation expertise lacked the academic and disciplinary expertise to understand the interplay among citations, authorial stance, and rhetorical move/step structures in their research writing. These writers could benefit from explicit feedback that raises their awareness of the strategic use of citations and stance, to facilitate the realization of rhetorical goals in research writing.

The Use of Stance Markers in Chinese and International Journal Abstracts in Aerospace

The Use of Stance Markers in Chinese and International Journal Abstracts in Aerospace

Stance expressions in applied linguistics research articles: A corpus-based contrastive study

Stance, a crucial aspect of academic writing, is complex and vital for both beginner and advanced writers. However, L2 English learners and experienced writers frequently struggle with using stance markers effectively. Currently, there remains a scarcity of research comparing the utilisation of stance markers in applied linguistics research articles between native English professional writers and L1 Indonesian speakers. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating similarities and differences in the deployment of stance markers in applied linguistics research articles by authors with L1 Indonesian and L1 English backgrounds and discussing the educational implications derived from the analysis results. The analysis involves two corpora: the Indonesian academic corpus (IAC), comprising articles authored by L1 Indonesians, and the English academic corpus (EAC), consisting of articles by native English speakers. The study investigates various types of stance markers and their distribution across the corpora, revealing significant differences in their usage. L2 English authors employ more boosters and attitude markers, while L1 English writers use more hedges and self-mentions, with the most notable disparities observed in the usage of self-references. These findings underscore the necessity for educators, particularly within the Indonesian context, to sensitise learners to the discursive norms surrounding the use of stance markers in applied linguistics research articles and provide targeted instruction to enhance English learners’ proficiency in employing stance markers effectively.

A corpus-based comparison of linguistic markers of stance and genre in the academic writing of novice and advanced engineering learners

AbstractStance-taking in academic writing plays a crucial role in enabling tertiary academic writers to express their positions about their topics and other voices. Based on a corpus linguistic analysis of academic reports by civil and environmental engineering (CEE) undergraduate students and student papers in the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP), this article investigates the use of stance markers in the genres of persuasive and argumentative writing as well as analytical explanatory writing. This study compares the stance markers used by L2 engineering students (Hong Kong University) and native engineering students (U.S. University) to investigate the genre-specific lexical stance patterns used by academic writers. This study found that stance within the CEE reports and MICUSP was expressed through approximative hedges and boosters, code glosses, and adversative and contrast connections, pointing to a specific developmental trajectory as academic writers. Non-native engineering students were found to use a significantly smaller number of approximative, self-mention, and evidential verb hedges. In addition, they tend to use a more significant number of modal hedges compared to native English speakers. The CEE students’ reports also tended to be characterized by the underuse of boosters, contrastive connectors, emphasis, and counter-expectancy markers. However, the study found no significant difference in the use of exemplification markers between the CEE and MICUSP. The findings of this study support the construction of the academic stance as a process of delimiting one’s perspective. This is achieved by deploying selected stance features to account for other scholarly perspectives.

Gender Similarities and Differences in the Usage of Stance Markers: A Study Based on Twenty TED Speeches

The past few decades have witnessed the hot discussion concerning language and gender from various aspects, with the use of stance markers as one of the most vital angles. To find out the gender similarities and differences in the use of stance markers under the classification by Hyland, figure out the gender features and summarize the behind reasons, this article combines the qualitative and quantitative analysis together, conducts a detailed analysis on twenty TED speeches delivered by ten male and ten female lecturers, respectively. Finally, the study finds that firstly, there are no distinctive differences in the use of stance markers in the primary class proposed by Hyland named hedges, boosters, attitude markers and self-mention. But the female lecturers use stance makers more frequently on the whole. Secondly, in terms of secondary class which complemented by other scholars, still no obvious differences are found in terms of hedges and attitude markers. Then, for the use of boosters, the males prefer fact-asserting while the females tend to use certainty-indicating. As for the employment of self-mention markers, words indicating authority such as I are more frequently used by males and those contributing to solidarity between the speaker and audience such as we are more commonly applied by females. The discovery of gender similarities and differences involves various reasons, and it provides important implications for the study of oral English.

Systematic Literature Review of Crosslinguistic Analysis of Stance Markers in EFL Learners’ Academic Writing in English

Evaluating the use of stance markers is an important approach to investigate the interactional and persuasive nature of academic writing in English. However, the problems EFL learners’ face using of stance markers and its research methodologies in crosslinguistic analysis are uncertain. This systematic literature review examined problems EFL learners’ face in using of stance markers and the research methodologies used to identify these problems in crosslinguistic research. The current study employed the PRISMA 2020 paradigm to conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) of crosslinguistic analysis of stance markers in EFL learners’ academic writing in English. Keywords queries on “stance*”, “academic writing*”, “metadiscourse*” and “metadiscursive*” were used to retrieve articles from Scopus and Web of Science databases. Following screening, 34 articles were included in the final analysis. EFL learners had problems in using hedges, boosters, self-mentions and attitude markers, and their main challenges were in the overuse of boosters and underuse of hedges. Chinese EFL learners had the most problems in using stance markers. All the 34 articles adopted an empirical approach and most were a corpus-based study. Researchers were fond of argumentative essays, dissertations, and research articles from coursework. In addition, scholars preferred one-way comparisons especially between native language and interlanguage (NL vs IL). Enhancing EFL learners' awareness of stance markers would require more instructions regarding stance markers in academic writing classrooms and future research should use three-way or four-way comparisons in crosslinguistic analysis.

Stance in article highlights: The promotion of Covid‐19 research

AbstractCovid‐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.

Asserting Authorial Identity through Stance and Voice: Expert vs. Novice Scientific Writers

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.

"We may conclude that:" a corpus-based study of stance-taking in conclusion sections of RAs across cultures and disciplines.

Research article conclusions form an important sub-genre in the academic community. This study aims to compare the use of stance markers in English and Chinese research article conclusions and investigate how stance markers may vary in soft and hard sciences. Based on Hyland's stance model, an analysis of stance markers over 20 years was made in two corpora, which were compiled with 180 research article conclusions in each language from four disciplines. It was found that English writers and soft science writers tended to make statements more tentatively by hedges and craft their persona more explicitly through self-mentions. However, Chinese writers and hard science writers made their claims with more certainty by boosters and showed their affective attitude more frequently through attitude markers. The results reveal how writers from different cultural backgrounds construct their stances and also unveil the disciplinary differences involved in stance-taking. It is hoped that this corpus study will inspire future research on stance-taking in the conclusion section and also help cultivate writers' genre awareness.

How do published Filipino scholars use stance markers over the years? A diachronic corpus-based study

ABSTRACT Authorial stance in academic writing is one of the vital aspects that recognises the evolution of writing to a more context-rich discourse, accounting for writer-reader relationships. Despite the growing interest in diachronic studies on stance markers, only a few studies have considered how stance changed in the recent years in the context of English as a Second Language (henceforth ESL) writing specifically that of Filipino writers. Consequently, this quantitative research diachronically examined stance markers in published research articles of Filipino scholars in the applied linguistics discipline. Chi-square test revealed that the overall use of stance markers varies over the years. Specifically, there is a decline in boosters and attitude markers and an increase in hedges and self-mentions. The overall quantitative findings revealed that Filipinos are becoming less subjective in writing while showcasing idea ownership in writing. This study ends with implications of the findings for academic writing instructions among Filipino writers. Future research directions are likewise provided.

Stance and Engagement Markers in The Jakarta Post's Opinion Articles

A number of research has currently established that written texts represent interactions between writers and readers. A range of linguistic features have been identified as a contribution to the author’s projection of a stance to the material referenced by the text, and, to further extent, the strategies used to presuppose the active role of an addressee. Based on the investigation of ten (10) English written opinion articles published by The Jakarta Post, this study used a qualitative case study approach. This study attempted to address the stance and engagement markers used in the opinion-ed writers page written in English using stance and engagement theory proposed by Hyland (2005) as its framework. This model shows a comprehensive and integrated way of analyzing the means by which interaction is achieved in opinion argument and how the discoursal preferences of disciplinary communities’ construct both writers and readers. Findings show that the interaction is adequately appropriate. The use of stance markers and engagement markers is not necessarily balanced. The study found that the stance markers is used more often than the engagement markers. The writers could have been used more innovatively. The overall findings of the study have both pedagogical and future research implications.

Stance-taking across monologic and dialogic modes of academic speech

The present study attempts to investigate the use of stance metadiscourse expressions found in two modes of academic speech, namely monologic seminars and dialogic discussions. Following Hyland’s classification of stance metadiscourse, the two datasets were analysed and compared in terms of frequency and functions of stance markers used. The findings showed that speakers in discussion sections made more frequent use of stance markers because of the existence of an interaction for which speakers explicitly attempted to stamp their discoursal self and express their voice. As for the discourse functions, hedges were found to be more frequent in seminars than in discussions, while self-mentions were more prevalent in discussions than in seminars. The results also suggested that the function of a few linguistic features was specific to only one of the spoken modes; for example, the attitude verb ‘agree’ and the paralinguistic feature of ‘pauses’ were typical of discussion sections. The findings of this study can be discussed in terms of familiarising novice and English non-native speakers with the metadiscursive features of seminar presentations and discussion sections, that is, to see how interlocutors in these two oral modes take a stance and project themselves into their arguments.

The Use of Interactional Metadiscourse Markers in English Book Reviews Across Disciplines

The study aimed to investigate the frequency and type of stance and engagement features in each move of book reviews of soft and hard disciplines according to Hyland’s (2005) Interactional Metadiscourse taxonomy. A corpus of 102 book reviews published by 30 first quality journals in 6 disciplines was randomly selected and analyzed. The results indicated a significant difference between book reviews in terms of stance markers. Furthermore, Move 2 (Outlining) enjoyed the highest frequency of stance features, while move 4 (Evaluation) contained the least frequency of stance features. Also, a significant difference was observed in the use of stance markers in Introducing, Outlining, and Highlighting. However, using engagement markers, the significant difference was only in the highlighting.

The Role of Connectives and Stance Markers in the Processing of Subjective Causal Relations

ABSTRACT Interpreting subjectivity in causal relations takes effort: Subjective, claim-argument relations are read slower than objective, cause-consequence relations. In an eye-tracking-while-reading experiment, we investigated whether connectives and stance markers can play a facilitative role. Sixty-five Chinese participants read sentences expressing a subjective causal relation, systematically varied in the use of stance markers (no, attitudinal, epistemic) in the first clause and connectives (neutral suoyi “so”, subjective kejian “so”) in the second clause. Results showed that processing subjectivity proceeds highly incrementally: The interplay of the subjectivity markers is visible as the sentence unfolds. Subjective connectives increased reading times, irrespective of the type of stance marker being used. Stance markers did, however, facilitate the processing of modal verbs in subjective relations. We conclude that processing subjectivity involves evaluating how the argument supports the claim and that connectives, modal verbs, and stance markers function as processing instructions that help readers achieve this evaluation.

Stance expressions in academic writing: A corpus-based comparison of Chinese students’ MA dissertations and PhD theses

One of the approaches to exploring the interactional and persuasive nature of academic writing is through the use of stance features in texts. Adopting a corpus-based analysis, this study compared how MA and PhD applied linguistics dissertations/theses in the Chinese mainland differed in terms of stance making in their texts. Two corpora were built for the study, an MA dissertation corpus and a PhD thesis corpus. The MA dissertations and PhD theses in each case were written by the same writers. The use of stance markers was examined using Hyland's framework for analysis. It was found that compared to their MA dissertations, student writers with doctoral training demonstrated some progress in stance making in their PhD theses. They employed fewer boosters, mastered a wider set of attitude markers, and displayed an increased ability to assert positions and involve readers in their texts. These findings reveal a developmental progression in the use of stance for these students which can hopefully inform academic writing training at the graduate level for Chinese students writing in English.

Stance Markers in Expert versus Novice English Academic Writing in Applied Linguistics

Stance, as a category of metadiscourse, involves a writer-oriented dimension in which writers express a textual voice to convey their judgments and commitments to potential readers. The present study investigates the use of stance markers in English academic writing with a focus on the degrees of academic expertise. The study has compiled two corpora, one consisting of novice writing (i.e., master’s theses written by Korean graduate students) and the other consisting of expert writing (i.e., published research articles) drawn from the discipline of applied linguistics, and has analyzed both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of stance practices within these corpora. The quantitative findings indicated that Korean novice writers employed significantly fewer stance markers than expert writers. The two groups of writers also made different choices in the employment of stance devices in different sections of research articles. Meanwhile, the qualitative analysis revealed that Korean novice writers often used inappropriate combinations of hedges and boosters, thereby failing to make an effective appeal to readers about their arguments. In addition, self-mentions were used differently by novice and expert writers, with only the latter group exploiting this category to maximize the perceived significance of their own research in the academic field. These findings are discussed in terms of pedagogical implications for EAP writing.

The importance of,it is important thatorimportantly?

AbstractThe ability to successfully position oneself in relation to one’s claims through the use of stance markers is of central importance for academic writers. This study, which uses data from one expert corpus (LOCRA) and three learner corpora (ALEC, VESPA and BATMAT), investigates the use of morphologically related stance markers that occur in different syntactic constructions (such aspossibly, the possibility ofandit is possible that). In doing so, it examines to what extent lexis, level of expertise in academic writing and L1 transfer influence the distribution of the different realizations of stance under investigation. The results show that all three variables are important predictors. In addition, differences pertaining to information structure are found to influence the distribution of two largely synonymous constructions (disjuncts and the introductoryitpattern). The findings suggest that there are principled explanations for why one construction is used instead of another functionally similar construction.

Stance and politeness in spoken Latvian

Abstract The present article is concerned with the concept of stance and its relationship to face, face work and politeness applied to Latvian spoken discourse. It offers an extensive review of relevant literature on stance and politeness theories, followed by an illustrative analysis of politeness strategies and stance markers found in a radio interview. On this basis, the article argues that stance markers - epistemic, evidential, mirative and hedging devices - may be considered a negative politeness strategy, responding to the speaker’s and hearer’s desire for autonomy. In conclusion, it suggests a hypothesis that could explain differing use of stance markers and politeness strategies by speakers fulfilling varying conversational roles and of various social standing.

Understanding how pre-service English teachers adopt stance toward academic teaching inquiry tasks

While teacher education literature views teachers’ stances toward teaching inquiry as important to teachers’ commitment to classroom improvement, little research has analyzed teachers’ use of stance markers. This project builds on Biber's (2006) framework to study stances taken by three high school English pre-service teachers (PSTs) in oral teaching-inquiry presentations completed during preparation coursework. This study considers: How do English PSTs enrolled in a teacher education program reveal stances through completion of oral presentations of teaching inquiry projects? The study employs methodology combining grammatical analysis with analysis of observational data from an in-depth study of PSTs’ experiences in their preparation. Findings reveal PSTs take varied, nuanced stances toward inquiry presentations, focal students, and project findings. Implications include that (1) studying how teachers formally discuss teaching activities can provide unique perspectives on teachers’ stance and (2) linguists can gain depth of understanding about participants’ stance by combining grammatical and observational analysis.

Stancetaking in seventeenth-century prefaces on obstetrics

This paper deals with authorial stance in prefatory material of Early Modern English manuals on women’s diseases. Publications on this field from between 1612 and 1699 constitute our corpus of study. Original digitalised texts have been analysed manually to identify and detect structures concerning authorial identity and stance, according to the model developed by Marín-Arrese (2009). This model for the identification of effective and epistemic stance strategies enables us to describe both the relationship between the authors and their texts and, more specifically, the power relationship between the writers and their audience. One of the most important conclusions of this study concerns the strategic use of stance markers to enhance the quality of these books and make them appropriate for a wide variety of readers.