The fact that

Stance nouns in disciplinary writing

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5965206
AutoresFeng Jiang (0000-0001-7369-9498, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, autor de correspondencia), K Hyland (0000-0002-4727-8355, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China)
Año2015
Volumen17
Número5
Páginas529-550
Fecha de publicación2015-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaDiscourse Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1461-4456 • E-ISSN: 1461-7080
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1461445615590719
OpenAlexW2163338948
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas52
Referencias citadas36

The linguistic resources used by academic writers to adopt a position and engage with readers, variously described as evaluation, stance and metadiscourse, have attracted considerable attention in recent years. A relatively overlooked means of expressing a stance, however, is through a Noun Complement structure, where a stance head noun takes a nominal complement clause. This pattern allows a writer to front-load attitude meanings and offers an explicit statement of evaluation of the proposition which follows (as in ‘The fact that science has a history is not an argument against the possibility of scientific truth’). In this article, we explore the frequencies, forms and functions of this structure in a corpus of 160 research articles across eight disciplines totalling 1.7 million words. Developing a new rhetorically based classification of stance nouns, we show that the structure is not only widely used to express author comment and evaluation, but that it exhibits considerable variation in the way that it is used to build knowledge across different disciplines

Academic writing · Discipline · Epistemology · Linguistics · Metadiscourse · Noun · Proposition · Sociology · Computer Science · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology