Although scientific research articles have traditionally been taken as examples of an objective style of writing that aims to minimise researchers’ voices in their texts (Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984:42), authors inevitably adopt stances towards the information presented and the target audience when writing their papers. This article explores authorial stance as expressed by adverbial markers in the introduction and conclusion sections of legal research papers. Following Biber et al. (1999), and Conrad and Biber (1999), our aim is to identify the most frequent adverbial markers of stance present in each section as indicators of (i) epistemicity, (ii) attitude, and (iii) style. We will try to show whether or not there are functional differences in the use of adverbial stance markers, and whether or not these are derived from the different communicative purposes of these sections.

This paper seeks to explore Middle English medical recipes from a metadiscursive perspective. This study will draw on Hyland's (2005) metadiscourse model where code glosses, endophoric markers, evidentials, frame markers and transition markers are included in the interactive dimension, and attitude markers, boosters, engagement markers, hedges and self mention are to be found within interactional metadiscourse. I shall apply this framework for the identification and analysis of data in a corpus which comprises a selection of recipes taken from both Middle English Medical Texts (Taavitsainen -Pahta -Mäkinen 2005) and The corpus of early English recipes. The metadiscursive approach to the study of medical recipes will allow us to establish links between authors, texts and audience of the recipe genre and, consequently, to affirm their status as products of social engagement.

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Medical recipes written before the birth of modern scientific writing, at least as we know it today, are frequently characterised by the inclusion of expressions aimed at validating the efficacy of the remedies. These expressions have been traditionally considered as promises of efficacy. This research hypothesises that a closer examination of the context in which they are embedded may render interpretations that are different from promissory speech acts in the strictest sense. The corpus of study has been excerpted from the Corpus of Early English Recipesand it comprises medical recipes written in English between 1500 and 1600. The texts have been analysed using AntConc and the results have been manually checked afterwards. The detection of potential promises of efficacy has relied on Speech Act Theory and particularly on Searle¿s (1969) constitutive rules for promises. Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995) has been used to account for the process of contextual enrichment the reader follows so as to derive the illocutionary force of efficacy statements. This work shows that not all efficacy statements are necessarily interpreted as promises in the Searlean sense. In fact, it has been observed that the occurrence of stance elements, i.e. epistemic and/or evidential devices, together with the authors¿ lexico-grammatical choices crucially shape their illocutionary force, normally by lowering the promissory value of the locutions.