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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
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