A Corpus-based Study of Stance in Scientific Research Articles

• Main Authors: Yu-jing Wang, 王宇靜
• Other Authors: Shih-ping Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/27557190048329815693

碩士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 應用外語系 === 102 === In recent years there has been a growing interest in the interactive and rhetorical character of academic writing. Recent researches into academic writing have shown how writers convey their stance and position writer-reader relations from genre analysis perspective. This study aims to investigate the distribution and collocation of stance in scientific research articles, in terms of four devices: hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mention. Following the approach taken by Hyland (2005), this study provides corpus evidence to reveal the high frequency lexical items of stance devices in scientific research articles. The data are drawn from a corpus of 1,000 scientific research articles (6,986,212 running words) collected from ten journals of IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). Moreover, the conclusion sections of 1,000 scientific research articles are also extracted from whole texts to build a sub-corpus (240,970 running words). The analytical tool Sketchengine is employed to analyze data. The findings of the current study show that the occurrence of stance devices in conclusion section of scientific research articles (36.2 per 1,000 words) is more frequent than that in whole texts of scientific research articles (21.6 per 1,000 words). Furthermore, the presence of hedges is more frequent than the presence of boosters, suggesting the importance for writers to present their statements with appropriate caution. The results also reveal higher than expected self-mentions in the corpus of IEEE journals. Finally, the study concludes with a discussion of stance feature in scientific research articles and underlines pedagogical implications in academic writing.