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Abstract

Across different languages and disciplines, authors use a variety of linguistic strategies to introduce their own voice into their academic texts. They do so, not only to report on their findings, but also to denote their agency and responsibility for the research overtly or covertly, to express certainty or possibility in the claims they are making, as well as their attitudes and assumptions, and to initiate a dialogue with their readership within the conventions of their national and disciplinary culture. All these notions fall under the concept of authorial stance. The present study employs a corpus-based approach to investigate the ways in which authors express their stance in scientific writing. The data is drawn from a corpus of 124 research articles, written in three languages – English, Serbian, and German, and in three scientific disciplines – linguistics, economics, and technology/engineering, by native speakers. The aim of this study is to investigate the quantitative and qualitative uses of markers of authorial stance across these academic and linguistic communities. Based on previous research on the notion of stance and its related conceptual categories, such as, inter alia, modality, evidentiality, and hedging, as well as their formal markers, an operationalising unified model of stance-taking was devised, drawing on these formal expressions and complemented by examples from the corpus, in order to dynamically analyse the corpus data. By adopting an onomasiological approach, six strategies denoting functions of stance-taking expressions proved to be most prominent in the corpus: depersonalisation, indetermination, subjectivisation, intensification, approximation, and evaluative reference. This data-based but category-inspired analysis was conducted through MAXQDA – a software tool for qualitative and quantitative text analysis. Quantitative results reveal distinct quantitative differences in the cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary use of these markers, as they are used most frequently in the German sub-corpus, as well as in the technology sub-corpus, and least frequently in the Serbian sub-corpus, as well as in the economics sub-corpus. Moreover, the most frequently used strategy is that of depersonalisation, used to omit authorial agency, while evaluative reference is the least frequently used strategy, used to evaluate previous research and position current work in the research landscape. These differences imply that authors in hard sciences (i.e. technology) tend to express their stance through impersonal means, while authors in soft sciences (i.e. linguistics and economics) express it through more involved and personalised means. Moreover, these differences suggest that authors writing in German also tend to express their stance through impersonal markers, while authors in English express it through more subjective means. These quantitative differences are further elaborated by a qualitative analysis, highlighting cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary differences in functional and formal categories of stance markers. While linguistic forms of stance markers may vary, their pragmatic, communicative, and interpersonal functions can be said to be almost identical across all sub-corpora. This may have important implications for the negotiation of preferred practices in the use of these markers when writing research papers in all three languages in the future and for aiding the pragmatic competence of non-native researchers and students when engaging in discourse with the international academic community. Therefore, this research has sociolinguistic, descriptive, and pedagogical implications.