Affiliation:
1. Brigham Young University, U.S.A.
2. Northern Arizona University, U.S.A.
Abstract
Academic writers can convey their attitudes and opinions, or stance, through carefully chosen reporting verbs, which introduce and cite sources while expressing author perspectives. Since reporting verbs reflect different authorial intentions, they can be categorized into different stance acts. However, there is limited research on how reporting verb stance varies across disciplines. In this study, we analysed the stance of reporting verbs in the background sections of 270 academic articles from six disciplines in the Academic Journal Registers Corpus (AJRC) (Gray, 2011). Two cluster analyses yielded three clusters of reporting verb patterns based on act type, and five clusters based on stance type. The distribution of these clusters varied across disciplines, with applied linguistics and history as well as physics and political science showing similar patterns.
This article was published open access under a CC BY licence:
https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0
.
Publisher
Liverpool University Press
Reference34 articles.
1. Philosophy of biology: Philosophical bias is the one bias that science cannot avoid;Andersen F.;eLife,2019
2. Stance in spoken and written university registers;Biber D.;Journal of English for Academic Purposes,2006
3. Styles of stance in English: Lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect;Biber D.;Text,1989
4. A concordance-based study of the use of reporting verbs as rhetorical devices in academic papers;Bloch J.;Journal of Writing Research,2010
5. Perturbing the system: “Hard science”, “soft science”, and social science, the anxiety and madness of method;Cassell J.;Human Organization,2002