Change of Attitude? A Diachronic Study of Stance

Abstract

Stance, or the writer's expression of personal attitudes and assessments of the status of knowledge in a text, has been a topic of interest to researchers of written communication for the last three decades. Notwithstanding this interest, and a more general curiosity concerning the gradual evolution of genres, very little is known of how stance in academic writing has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred uniformly across disciplines. Drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from the top five journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we seek to determine whether authorial projection has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years. Our paper presents, and attempt to account for, some surprising variations and an overall decline in explicit stance during this period.Successful research writers construct texts by taking a novel point of view towards the issues they discuss while anticipating readers' imagined reactions to those views. This intersubjective positioning is encompassed by the term stance and, in various guises, has been a topic of interest to researchers of written communication and applied linguists for the last three decades. Recognising that academic writing is less objective and "author evacuated" than Geertz (1988) and others once supposed, analysts have sought to identify the ways that writers use language to acknowledge and construct social relations as they negotiate agreement of their interpretations of data with readers.Despite prolonged and widespread curiosity concerning the notion of stance, however, together with an interest in the gradual evolution of research genres more generally, very little is known of how it has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred uniformly across disciplines. In this paper we set out to explore these issues. Drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words 2 taken from the top five journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we seek to determine whether authorial projection has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years. Conceptions of stanceThe ways that writers and speakers express their opinions is an important feature of all interaction and researchers have long been concerned with describing how stance is linguistically marked. A range of terms have been used to conceptualise the idea. Some are umbrella conceptions such as posture (Grabe 1984), attitude (Halliday, 2004), appraisal (Martin, 2000), evaluation (Hunston & Thompson, 2000) and metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005a). Others focus more specifically on the linguistic realisations of judgements, feelings, or viewpoints by looking at intensity (Labov 1984), disjuncts (Quirk et al, 1985), hedges (Hyland, 1998) and modality (Palmer, 1986).Two related ideas have been particularly influential in current conceptions of stance: evidentiality (Chafe, 1986;Chafe and Nichols, 1986) and affect (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1989;Besnier, 1990).Evidentiality refers to the status of the knowledge contained ...

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