Stance in the corpus of English life sciences texts: A vindication of text-reading

Abstract

[Abstract] Stance in academic writing has been discussed extensively within the fields of discourse analysis andpragmatics (Alonso-Almeida, 2015; Hyland,2005; White, 2003). Thus, Hyland and Jiang (2016) identify certain linguistic elements that are said to be indexical of stance: hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions. While that model aims at a macroscopic analysis, the present study is a microscopic one, and compares two scientific texts written by a male and a female author to detect possible differences in the way that these authors present themselves or give their opinions in their writings. To this end, we have sought to apply Hyland and Jiang’s (2016) three-aspects modelbutusing Cesiri’s inventory (2012) as a starting point. We have applied this adapted model to two samples from the Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts (CELiST), one of the subcorpus of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. Both texts belong to the same genre, are dated at an almost identical time, and deal with similar subjects. The only difference is that one was written by a woman, Emily Gregory, and theother by a man, Alpheus Packard. Although these texts are part of an electronic corpus, on this occasion we will avoid the automatic analytical techniques of corpus linguistics asfaras possible. Rather, we will conduct a microscopic-level study by means of close reading, although some quantification of data will precede the qualitative analysis where this is useful. It is hoped that the qualitative focus presented in theanalysis might open up new paths in the study of stance.