Cover not available
Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 23:4 (2018) ► pp.408–436

The textual colligation of stance phraseology in cross-disciplinary academic discourse

The timing of authors’ self-projection

| The University of Auckland
| The University of Auckland

This study investigates the textual colligation of stance phrases at the levels of sentence, paragraph and text in empirical research articles from agriculture and economics. We extracted the textual positions of stance phrases with the software Wordskew (Barlow, 2016) in two purpose-built corpora of around three million tokens. The results show that stance phrases display similar distribution patterns in the two disciplinary corpora; however, we found significant differences with respect to the frequency of stance phrases in particular textual positions in each corpus. The findings consolidate Hoey’s (2005) premise that certain expressions are primed to occur in particular textual positions. We contend that the textual positions of stance phrases may be a result of the routinised discourse function that they serve, and that the appropriate timing of stance-taking is of particular communicative importance.

Keywords: textual colligation, stance phrases, lexical priming, disciplinary variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Textual colligation and stance expressions
    • 2.1Textual colligation
    • 2.2Stance features and disciplinary variation
    • 2.3Stance framework
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Corpora
    • 3.2Retrieval of stance phrases and their textual colligation
    • 3.3Analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Hedging phrases
    • 4.2Booster phrases
    • 4.3Attitude phrases
    • 4.4Self-mention phrases
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.16137.don
References
Ädel, A.
(2006) Metadiscourse in L1 and L2 English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, M.
(1984) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. (C. Emerson, Ed. & Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barlow, M.
(2004) Collocate 1.0. Collocation Extraction Software [Computer software]. Houston, TX: Athelstan.Google Scholar
(2016)  Wordskew: Linking corpus data and discourse structure. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 21(1), 105–115. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bazerman, C.
(2010) The Informed Writer: Using Sources in the Disciplines. Fort Collins, CO: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Becher, T., & Trowler, P. R.
(2001) Academic Tribes and Territories. Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines. Buckingham: Open University Press.Google Scholar
Biber, D.
(1993) Representativeness in corpus design. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 8(4), 243–257. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2006) Stance in spoken and written university registers. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5(2), 97–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E.
(1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Cortes, V.
(2004) ‘If you look at…’: Lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks. Applied Linguistics, 25(3), 371–405 DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bondi, M.
(1999) English across Genres: Language Variation in the Discourse of Economics. Modena: Edizioni Il Fiorino.Google Scholar
Bruce, I.
(2014) Expressing criticality in the literature review in research article introductions in applied linguistics and psychology. English for Specific Purposes, 36(1), 85–96. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2016) Constructing critical stance in university essays in English literature and sociology. English for Specific Purposes, 421, 13–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Charles, M.
(2003) ‘This mystery…’: A corpus-based study of the use of nouns to construct stance in theses from two contrasting disciplines. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2(4), 313–326. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2006) The construction of stance in reporting clauses: A cross-disciplinary study of theses. Applied Linguistics, 27(3), 492–518. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cohen, J.
(1988) Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Crismore, A., & Farnsworth, R.
(1990) Metadiscourse in popular and professional science discourse. In W. Nash (Ed.), The Writing Scholar: Studies in Academic Discourse (pp. 118–136). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Dahl, T.
(2004) Textual metadiscourse in research articles: A marker of national culture or of academic discipline? Journal of Pragmatics, 36(10), 1807–1825. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Del Saz-Rubio, M. M.
(2011) A pragmatic approach to the macro-structure and metadiscoursal features of research article introductions in the field of Agricultural Sciences. English for Specific Purposes, 30(4), 258-271. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Donohue, J. P.
(2006) How to support a one-handed economist: The role of modalisation in economic forecasting. English for Specific Purposes, 25(2), 200–216. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoey, M.
(2005) Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hoey, M., & O’Donnell, M. B.
(2008) Lexicography, grammar, and textual position. International Journal of Lexicography, 21(3), 293–309. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2015) Examining associations between lexis and textual position in hard news stories, or according to a study by…. In N. Groom, M. Charles, & S. John (Eds.), Corpora, Grammar and Discourse. In Honour of Susan Hunston (pp. 117–144). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hyland, K.
(1998) Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1999) Disciplinary discourses: Writer stance in research articles. In C. Candlin & K. Hyland (Eds.), Writing: Texts, Processes and Practices (pp. 99–121). London: Longman.Google Scholar
(2001) Humble servants of the discipline? Self-mention in research articles. English for Specific Purposes, 20(3), 207–226. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2004) Disciplinary interactions: Metadiscourse in L2 postgraduate writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 13(2), 133–151. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2005) Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies, 7(2), 173–192. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2006) Disciplinary differences: Language variation in academic discourses. In K. Hyland & M. Bondi (Eds.), Academic Discourse Across Disciplines (pp. 17–48). Bern: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2008) Persuasion, interaction and the construction of knowledge: Representing self and others in research writing. International Journal of English Studies, 8(2), 1–23.Google Scholar
(2009) Academic Discourse: English in a Global Context. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
(2011) Disciplines and discourses: Social interactions in the construction of knowledge. In D. Starke-Meyerring, A. Paré, N. Artemeva, M. Horne & L. Yousoubova (Eds.), Writing in Knowledge Societies (pp. 193–214). Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse.Google Scholar
Hyland, K., & Hamp-Lyons, L.
(2002) EAP: Issues and directions. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 1(1), 1–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hyland, K., & Tse, P.
(2005) Hooking the reader: A corpus study of evaluative that in abstracts. English for Specific Purposes, 24(2), 123–139. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ivanic, R.
(1998) Writing and Identity: The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jiang, F. K., & Hyland, K.
(2016) Nouns and academic interactions: A neglected feature of metadiscourse. Applied Linguistics, 37(4), 1–25.Google Scholar
Khedri, M., Heng, C. S., & Ebrahimi, S. F.
(2013) An exploration of interactive metadiscourse markers in academic research article abstracts in two disciplines. Discourse Studies, 15(3), 319–331 DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lancaster, Z.
(2016) Expressing stance in undergraduate writing: Discipline-specific and general qualities. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 231, 16–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mahlberg, M.
(2007) Clusters, key clusters and local textual functions in Dickens. Corpora, 2(1), 1–31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2009) Local textual functions of move in newspaper story patterns. In U. Römer & R. Schulze (Eds.), Exploring the Lexis-grammar Interface (pp. 265–287). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mahlberg, M., & O’Donnell, M. B.
(2008) A fresh view of the structure of hard news stories. In S. Neumann & E. Steiner (Eds.), Online Proceedings of the 19th European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference and Workshop, Saarbrücken: Universität des Saarlandes. Retrieved from [URL] (last accessed September 2018)
Martínez, I. A., Beck, S. C., & Panza, C. B.
(2009) Academic vocabulary in agriculture research articles: A corpus-based study. English for Specific Purposes, 28(3), 183–198. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mauranen, A.
(1993) Contrastive ESP rhetoric: Metatext in Finnish-English economics texts. English for Specific Purposes, 12(1), 3–22. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moreno, A. I.
(2004) Retrospective labelling in premise-conclusion metatext: An English-Spanish contrastive study of research articles on business and economics. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 3(4), 321–339. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
O’Donnell, M. B., Scott, M., Mahlberg, M., & Hoey, M.
(2012) Exploring text-initial words, clusters and concgrams in a newspaper corpus. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 8(1), 73–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Peacock, M.
(2012) High-frequency collocations of nouns in research articles across eight disciplines. Ibérica, 231, 29–46.Google Scholar
Rongen Breivega, K., Dahl, T., & Fløttum, K.
(2002) Traces of self and others in research articles. A comparative pilot study of English, French and Norwegian research articles in medicine, economics and linguistics. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 12(2), 218–239. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Römer, U.
(2011) Observations on the phraseology of academic writing: Local patterns – Local meanings? In T. Herbst, S. Faulhaber & F. Uhrig (Eds.). The Phraseological View of Language: A Tribute to John Sinclair (pp. 211–227). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Römer, U., & O’Donnell, M. B.
(2010, May). Positional variation of n-grams and phrase-frames in a new corpus of proficient student writing. Paper presented at the ICAME 31 Conference , Giessen, Germany.
Samraj, B.
(2005) An exploration of genre set: Research article abstracts and introductions in disciplines. English for Specific Purposes, 24(2), 141–156. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scott, M. R.
(1996) WordSmith Tools [Computer software]. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, M.
(1997) PC Analysis of key words – And key key words. System, 25(2), 233–245. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shaw, P.
(2003) Evaluation and promotion across languages. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2(4), 343–357. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Simpson-Vlach, R., & Ellis, N. C.
(2010) An academic formulas list: New methods in phraseology research. Applied Linguistics, 31(4), 487–512. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stotesbury, H.
(2003) Evaluation in research article abstracts in the narrative and hard sciences. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2(4), 327–341. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stubbs, M.
(1996) Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer-assisted Studies of Language and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. B.
(2004) Academic Writing for Graduate Students: Essential Tasks and Skills. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, P.
(2014) Exploring Hoey’s notion of textual colligation in a corpus of student writing. In A. Alcaraz-Sintes & S. Valera-Hernández (Eds.). Diachrony and Synchrony in English Corpus Linguistics (pp. 347–372). Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Thompson, P., & Tribble, C.
(2001) Looking at citations: Using corpora in English for academic purposes. Language Learning & Technology, 5(3), 91–105.Google Scholar
Yeo, J. Y., & Ting, S. H.
(2014) Personal pronouns for student engagement in arts and science lecture introductions. English for Specific Purposes, 34(1), 26–37. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zuck, J. G., & Zuck, L. V.
(1986) Hedging in news writing. In A. M. Cornu, J. Van Parjis, M. Delahaye & L. Baten (Eds.), Beads or bracelets? How do we approach LSP (pp. 172–180). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

Dong, Jihua
2019. Book review: Charlotte Taylor and Anna Marchi (eds),Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review. Discourse Studies 21:4 ► pp. 490 ff. DOI logo
Dong, Jihua, Louisa Buckingham & Hao Wu
2021. A discourse dynamics exploration of attitudinal responses towards COVID-19 in academia and media. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 26:4 ► pp. 532 ff. DOI logo
Dong, Jihua & Xiaofei Lu
2020. Promoting discipline-specific genre competence with corpus-based genre analysis activities. English for Specific Purposes 58 ► pp. 138 ff. DOI logo
Hyland, Ken & Hang (Joanna) Zou
2021. “I believe the findings are fascinating”: Stance in three-minute theses. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 50 ► pp. 100973 ff. DOI logo
Xie, Jianping
2020. A review of research on authorial evaluation in English academic writing: A methodological perspective. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 47 ► pp. 100892 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 august 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.