Stance phraseology in academic discourse: cross-disciplinary variation in authors’ presence

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the stance phrases used by agricultural science and economics scholars to establish their identity and authority in academic discourse. Adopting a corpus-driven approach, this study first retrieved 2- to 5- grams from two self-built corpora consisting of agriculture and economics research articles and then classified them functionally by following the three metafunctions in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Statistical comparisons show that agriculture researchers use cognitive, attitude, and hedging phrases more frequently, while the economics corpus contains significantly more evidentiality phrases. This paper contributes to the categorization of stance phrases by synthesizing and refining existing stance classifications and incorporating the reason-oriented dimension. The findings can enrich our understanding of disciplinary variation in academic discourse, and can inform academic writing pedagogy with respect to curriculum design and materials development.

Keywords

• classification framework
• corpus-driven approach
• disciplinary variation
• cognitive stance
• natural language toolki