Representation of Authorial Stance in German Scientific Text: Diachronic Change

Abstract

The paper analyzes historical change in article in strategies and linguistic means of representation of authorial stance in German scientific texts of the 17th-19th centuries. The topicality of the research question is due to the growing interest in the evolution of discourse in general and of discursive patterns in specific spheres of communication, such as scientific communication in particular. The author also notes that discursive practices are characterized by “social indexicality” determining the relationship of linguistic content of the text with its extralinguistic context. The paper considers two basic types of authorial stance: epistemic stance, which expresses the estimated probability of a proposition, and affect related to attitudinal and emotional aspects of the authorial stance in a scientific text. The paper presents the analysis of the corpus including scientific works of German authors divided into three groups according to the time of their publication (texts of the 17th century, the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century respectively). As a result, the author identifies certain trends in the evolution of the ways to represent authorial stance. Thus, there is increasing variety and growing frequency of linguistic means expressing epistemic stance. It is shown that affective stance gradually changes its semantics from the general emotional attitude to the cognitive-oriented one. The author suggests that these trends can be interpreted as a manifestation of the principle of social indexicality describing the reflection of social and historical context in communicative-discursive practices. The trends presented in the paper may be considered as reflecting the processes of development of science as a social institution and the formation of a professional community.

Keywords

• diachronic linguistics
• academic discourse
• authorial stance
• epistemic stance
• affect