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Introduction
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Building upon his earlier work in hedging and boosting, Hyland (2005)
put forth an overall paradigm of stance specifically related to academic
writing, which focused on writer-oriented features of interaction and refers
to the ways academics annotate their texts to comment on the possible
accuracy or credibility of a claim, the extent they want to commit themselves to it, or the attitude they want to convey to an entity, a proposition, or the reader (emphasis in original, p. 178). Thus, Hylands stance
framework encompasses evidentiality (identified in terms of hedging and
boosting and corresponding to varying levels of commitment towards
a proposition), affect or attitude markers, and presence (the degree to
which a writer places him/herself in a text through the use of first person
pronouns and possessive determiners).
Throughout discussions of stance, the term evaluation is often used
in explaining the meanings of stance markers, as they offer the writer/
speakers evaluation of a proposition or entity. Thus, it is no surprise
that a related body of research has been conducted under the umbrella
term of evaluation. Hunston and colleagues (Hunston and Thompson,
2000; Hunston and Sinclair, 2000; Hunston, 1994) have been particularly influential here, and Thompson and Hunston (2000: 226) outline
four parameters, or meanings, that evaluative language can convey:
1. Goodbad, or evaluations of positive and negative values or characteristics (value in Hunston, 1994);
2. Certainty, relating to the degree of certainty the speaker/writer has
with regard to information (status in Hunston, 1994);
3. Expectedness, referring to how obvious or expected the information
is to the hearer/reader;
4. Importance or relevance (relevance in Hunston, 1994).
The final approach to stance that we introduce here is that of appraisal
(Martin, 2000, 2003; Martin and White, 2005). Situated within systemic
functional linguistics, appraisal theory builds upon the traditional
concepts of affect and epistemic modality, and encompasses attitude,
engagement and graduation. In this framework, attitudinal stance meanings are further categorized as indicating affect (emotional responses),
judgement (moral evaluations) and appreciation (aesthetic evaluations).
Martin and White (2005: 36) roughly align engagement, on the other
hand, with epistemic stance meanings, and describe engagement as
concerned with the ways in which resources such as projective, modality, polarity, concession and various comment adverbials position the
speaker/writer with respect to the value position being advanced and
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Many of the most common words in English are evaluative and used
for lexical expressions of stance (see Biber et al., 1999: 9689). For example, the most common adjectives in conversation include good, bad,
lovely and nice, used in both predicative and attributive functions:
oh thats bad.
you climb the mountain because its a nice hike.
A good place to start is the text.
Similarly, the most common verbs in conversation include like, love,
need and want, which express an emotion or attitude towards whatever
is referred to by the direct object:
Number three, we love stuff.
Such lexical expressions of stance are not restricted to conversation. For
example, several of the most common attributive adjectives in academic
prose are evaluative, including appropriate, good/best, important, practical,
useful (see Biber et al., 1999: 51115):
Scott states that the severity of a sanction leveled by others on an individual who has violated a norm represents one of the best indications of
the norms relative.
This group occupies important economic positions and some of its members have even been elected as foremen of their economic branch.
As the above examples illustrate, lexical expressions of stance depend
on the context and shared background for appropriate interpretation
as speaker/writer attitudes and evaluations. That is, there is nothing
in the grammatical structure of these expressions to show that they
mark stance: they are simple declarative structures that give the appearance of presenting stanceless facts. Thus, most attributive adjectives
are descriptive or classificatory, but not evaluative. Thus, compare the
adjectives in the following sentence to those illustrated above:
The amount of information concerning the ultrastructural correlates of
skeletal muscle denervation atrophy has grown considerably in recent
years, but only a slow progress has been made toward a substantial
understanding of the problem.
In sum, the simple use of value-laden words provides no overt grammatical devices to signal the presence of stance. Stance is embedded in
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Some theorists go so far as to assert that schizophrenia is largely the creation of society
Most corpus-based studies of stance apply a lexico-grammatical methodological approach, analysing the sets of lexical items in specific grammatical structures that express particular stance meanings (certain
that-clause expressing epistemic stance, versus interesting that-clause
expressing attitudinal stance). Stance features of this type can be reliably identified and quantified through the use of automatic tools. The
frameworks presented in Biber (2006a, b; Biber and Finegan, 1989; Biber
et al., 1999), Hyland (1996, 1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2000) and Hunston
and Sinclair (2000) generally take this approach, and analyse a variety
of structural types of stance markers. Each stance marker is also typically
categorized along the cline of epistemic (expressing certainty, doubt/likelihood, and style of speaking) and attitudinal meanings.
Other research focuses more specifically on a single lexical item (e.g.
Diani, 2008 on really), a lexical class (e.g. Swales and Burke, 2003 on
evaluative adjectives), or a particular grammatical structure (e.g. Biber
and Finegan, 1988 on stance adverbials; Baratta, 2009 on passives;
Charles, 2006, 2007 and Hyland and Tse, 2005 on stance constructions
with that-clauses). A final, complementary approach involves a close
reading of a text to inductively identify instances of evaluative language
(e.g. Hunston 1993, 1994; Tucker, 2003). This type of research is more
often carried out within the evaluation and appraisal frameworks (e.g.
White, 2003; Dressen, 2003), and can include discussion of both grammatical and lexical stance expressions.
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faceless and impersonal (Hyland, 2005: 173). Hunston (1994: 192) goes
so far as to claim that persuasion is the primary goal of experimental
research reports, and thus the authors primary purpose is to persuade
the academic community to accept the new knowledge claims and
to adjust its network of consensual knowledge in order to accommodate
those claims. Building on these new perspectives, numerous studies
have investigated the expression of stance and evaluation in written
academic discourse (e.g. Baratta, 2009; Charles, 2006, 2007; Dressen,
2003; Hunston, 1993, 1994; Hyland, 1996, 1998a, b, 1999, 2000;
Hyland and Tse, 2005; Mauranen and Bondi, 2003b; Silver, 2003; Swales
and Burke, 2003; Tucker, 2003).
However, comparative register research shows that the old stereotypes
about the stanceless nature of academic writing are to some extent
accurate. The studies surveyed in the last paragraph argue for the importance of stance in academic writing by restricting the scope of investigation to this single register. In contrast, studies that take a multi-register
perspective have shown repeatedly that overt stance expressions are
relatively rare in academic writing when compared to other spoken and
written registers. Thus, for example, 75 per cent of the written academic
texts analysed in Biber and Finegan (1989) were statistically categorized
as faceless (using a cluster analysis, based on the distribution of 12
lexico-grammatical stance devices). In contrast, most personal letters
were grouped in the emphatic expression of affect cluster, and most
public speeches were grouped in the oral controversial persuasion
stance category.
As noted above, multidimensional studies of register variation have
consistently identified one or more linguistic dimensions of variation that
are associated with stance functions. However, those dimensions show
that stance is especially prevalent in spoken registers and overtly interpersonal or persuasive written registers; in contrast, lexico-grammatical
stance devices are comparatively rare in informational written registers
like academic prose or official documents. These patterns have been
replicated in studies of general spoken and written English registers
(Biber, 1988) and university spoken and written registers (Biber, 2006b:
177212), as well as spoken and written registers in other languages like
Somali, Korean and Spanish (Biber, 1995: 24952; Biber et al., 2006).
Detailed corpus-based studies of lexico-grammatical stance features
also show these same patterns. For example, the Longman Grammar of
Spoken and Written English devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 12) to
the description of grammatical stance devices in four major registers.
Overall, stance expressions are much more common in conversation
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Concluding remarks
While previous research has established that stance markers are used to
a higher extent in spoken registers when compared to written registers,
this research has also illustrated the prevalence of epistemic stance
meanings in all academic registers, regardless of mode. For example,
the results summarized from Biber (2006b) above show that stance
markers indicating the degree of commitment a writer has toward a
proposition or entity are most prevalent in nearly all cases. Although
the exact results have not been included here due to space constraints,
Biber (2006b) found that attitudinal markers are not used commonly in
any of the written academic registers, and are particularly not attested
in the written informational registers of textbooks and research articles.
Rather, the written informational registers rely most on markers indicating a high degree of commitment (certainty), followed by likelihood
and communication stance markers.
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However, the study also illustrates that written registers also exhibit
unique patterns of stance marking. Of the findings summarized for
written registers, written academic registers have also attested the use
of complement clauses headed by stance nouns as explicit markers of
stance, while these structures are largely absent from all spoken academic registers.
Furthermore, it should be clear, from the brief analysis of evaluative lexis, that more implicitly marked stance is also worthy of study
in academic writing, and future research would benefit greatly from
the development of analytical approaches that would allow for the
large-scale analysis of evaluative lexis in addition to the more explicitly
marked lexico-grammatical stance. While it is feasible to analyse previously established stance words in environments other than the lexicogrammatical patterns identified in this case study through large-scale,
automated processes (with the assumption that these words do indeed
carry stance meanings in these other contexts), it would be much more
difficult to identify additional words and phrases with a high degree
of reliability. That is, while we can confidently identify stance words
that occur in contexts (such as complement clauses) where the stance
expressed is grammatically related to a proposition, it is more difficult
to identify stance words that are not as overtly expressed grammatically.
Thus, approaches which allow for the reliable analysis of evaluative lexis
in large corpora need to be developed and evaluated in future research.
Finally, it should be noted that the analysis presented in this chapter has focused on broad patterns in the types and general meanings
expressed by stance markers in several academic registers, rather than
detailed analyses and interpretations of meanings and textual functions. This, along with comments on disciplinary differences in the use
of stance markers, we leave for the chapters that follow.
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