Adverbial stance marking in the introduction and conclusion sections of legal research articles

Abstract

<p class="Abstract"><span lang="EN-GB">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</span><span lang="EN-GB">.</span></p

Author stance in doctoral dissertations of native and non-native speakers of English: A corpus-based study on epistemic adverbs

“…As for the distribution of certainty and likelihood categories in three corpora, it is revealed that certainty adverbs outnumbered likelihood adverbs in all sets, confirming the findings of previous studies (i.e. Biber, 2006;Kotrč, 2012;Molina, 2012;Adams & Quintana-Toledo, 2013). Figure 1 demonstrates the related distribution across three corpora.…”

Use of Modal Verbs as Stance Markers in Pakistani English Newspaper Editorials

“…The presence of modality and stance has been observed in many studies (e.g. Adams & Quintana-Toledo, 2013;Biber, 2004;Bista, 2009;Butler, 1990;Chang, 2010Chang, , 2012 All of above studies sufficiently prove that stance is present in almost every type of writing. However, this study presents an investigation of modality and stance marking in newspapers with a special focus on the editorial texts selected for this study from four famous Pakistani English newspapers.…”

A cross-disciplinary study of stance markers in research articles written by students and experts

“…Within the vast literature on interaction, the notion of stance has remained somewhat elusive because of the inequivalent definitions and categorizations across scholarly works under the concept of stance (Adams & Quintana-Toledo, 2013). Over the last three decades or so, researchers have used a variety of terms to refer to the concept of stance including evaluation (Hunston & Thompson, 1999), affect (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1989), hedging (Holmes, 1988;Hyland, 1996aHyland, , 1996bSalager-Meyer, 1994, 1995, evidentiality (Chafe & Nichols, 1986;Nuytz, 2001), modality (Palmer, 1979) and stance (Beach & Anson, 1992;Biber & Finegan, 1988;1989;Biber, et al, 1999;Hyland, 2005a).…”

“…Coinciding with Abdollahzadeh's (2011) argument, several studies have turned their attention to the disciplinary use of stance devices (Abdi, 2002;Adams & Quintana-Toledo, 2013;Hyland, 2005aHyland, , 2011McGrath & Kuteeva, 2012;Pho, 2008;Silver, 2003;Vassileva, 2001).…”

“…In order to explore expressions of stance-taking, some studies paid attention to understanding stance-taking in one particular field of study (Abdollahzadeh, 2011;Adams & Quintana-Toledo, 2013;Ahmad & Mehrjooseresht, 2012;McGrath & Kuteeva, 2012;Salager-Meyer, 1994), while some examined disciplinary differences and focused on either soft fields or hard fields (Abdi, 2002;Hyland, 2005aHyland, , 2006bKong, 2006;Millan, 2008;Pho, 2008;Sayah & Hashemi, 2014;Silver, 2003;Taki & Jafarpour, 2012;Vassileva, 2001;Vold, 2006a). The analysis of stance markers across disciplines has revealed that each discipline has its own way of constructing stance and that even different disciplines under the same category (hard and soft sciences) indicated different uses of stance features.…”