| With the increasing academic exchange opportunity in international arena,the number of published papers in international journals written by graduate students and teachers is rising continuously in order to enhance China’s international reputation in the academic field.Academic discourses are an important place for authors to express their views(Zhong & Guo,2020),so academic research articles inevitably involve the authorial presence.Authorial presence often used to implicitly and explicitly voice the author’s value judgement,standpoint and emotional expression,has gradually become an important issue that cannot be ignored in terms of academic writing.In recent years,stance markers have served as an important avenue for scholars at home and abroad to examine authorial stance in research articles,but their research perspectives are limited,interdisciplinary and diachronic comparative studies do not seem to have attracted widespread academic attention.Based on the categorization of stance markers proposed by Biber(1999)and Hyland(2005),this paper generalizes a theoretical framework suitable for this study and aims to reveal the multi-disciplinary differences and diachronic changes in the use of stance markers in Chinese scholars’ academic discourses.The current research analyzes the stance frequency,disciplinary preference,and distribution characteristics of stance markers with 240 journal papers in total from four disciplines of economics,education,science and engineering,and further explores developmental changes of stance markers over time in academic research articles of the four disciplines in the past three decades.The present research intends to answer the following three questions:1)What is the overall distribution of stance markers in research articles of economics,education,science and engineering?2)What are the similarities and differences in the use of stance markers in economics,education,science,and engineering research articles? And what are the underlying reasons?3)How do stance markers in these four disciplines change over the last 30 years?To answer the above three research questions,the authors collected a total of 240 research articles(according to 2020 Journal Impact Factor Rankings)written by Chinese scholars spanning three periods of 1991-2000,2001-2010,2011-2020 from 33 international journals in economics,education,science and engineering and extracted the abstract,introduction,methodology and results and discussion sections.The corpus size was approximately 1257121 words.This research mainly used the following research tools: Antconc 3.5.8,Stance Marker Visualization Software(independently designed by graduate students of the School of Computer Science,Chongqing University),R Studio,SPSS 26.0,etc.The study found that,in general,science occupies the largest number of stance markers,followed by engineering,economics and education.Moreover,in comparison of stance markers,the four disciplines have similar characteristics in the use of stance markers,that is,epistemic stance>attitudinal stance>authorial presence stance.Specifically,in the process of interdisciplinary comparison,we found: 1)writers in economics and engineering tend to use the certainty marker "show" to explain their important research results while science writers are more likely to make confident predictions through the use of the certainty marker of "will",which follows the common disciplinary culture of the "comprehensibility" in the natural world environment.2)Through the use of hedging markers,writers in the field of education presuppose the limitations and unconsidered factors of their research in a humble way;by comparison,in the field of science,the writers first put forward their own point of view by guessing,and then they try to prove the hypothesis of other scholars with the help of hedging markers after presenting the data.3)The author unexpectedly found that science involves the most emotional markers,which is contrary to the traditional impression that it is usually considered to maintain objectivity.4)There is a common feature in these four disciplines in the use of authorial presence markers,that is,they all tend to use "we" to evoke the interaction among the authors and readers.However,first-person pronouns are less commonly used in education,possibly for two reasons.One is that soft subject writers are often taught that these words may affect the academic culture of objectivity in academic writing(Hyland,2004).The second is that some soft subject writers seem to imply themselves in their work to avoid misuse or confusion showing their lack of confidence or their humility about certain intellectual claims.During the diachronic evolution,we found: 1)The significant growth of evidentiality,appraisal and first-person pronouns indicates that more and more Chinese economic writers are in this process of confidently conveying the original value of the proposition.2)Education has recorded a steady rise in authorial presence markers,which is consistent with Hyland & Jiang(2016)’s view on diachronic change that soft and hard domains shift towards a convergence in the use of rhetorical devices trend.3)The sharp decline of hedging devices in the science disciplines over time may have been influenced by the discipline convention that any opinion required to be published in a mathematical journal paper needs to be supported by accurate data(Mcgrath & Kut,2012).4)In the choice of stance markers,engineering disciplines gradually choose some popular evaluation words,which may be due to the increasing fierce competition for the “commercialization” of knowledge contexts,forcing engineering scholars to strive to attract a wide range of readers in discourse construction(Hyland & Zou,2021).The current study explores the disciplinary characteristics and developmental changes of stance markers in academic research articles of the four disciplines of economics,education,science and engineering written by Chinese scholars in order to reveal the influence of specific discipline culture and disciplinary conventions on the construction of academic discourse positions.It is hoped that the research results presented in this study can provide important guidance for Chinese in the process of academic writing and teaching. |
PDF Full Text Request