Feng (Kevin) Jiang

'The fact that': Stance nouns in disciplinary writing

The linguistic resources used by academic writers to adopt a position and engage with readers, variously described as evaluation, stance and metadiscourse, have attracted considerable attention in recent years. A relatively overlooked means of expressing a stance, however, is through a Noun Complement structure, where a stance head noun takes a nominal complement clause. This pattern allows a writer to front-load attitude meanings and offers an explicit statement of evaluation of the proposition which follows (as in ‘The fact that science has a history is not an argument against the possibility of scientific truth’). In this article, we explore the frequencies, forms and functions of this structure in a corpus of 160 research articles across eight disciplines totalling 1.7 million words. Developing a new rhetorically based classification of stance nouns, we show that the structure is not only widely used to express author comment and evaluation, but that it exhibits considerable variation in the way that it is used to build knowledge across different disciplines.

Change of Attitude? A Diachronic Study of Stance

Successful research writers construct texts by taking a novel point of view toward the issues they discuss while anticipating readers’ imagined reactions to those views. This intersubjective positioning is encompassed by the term stance and, in various guises, has been a topic of interest to researchers of written communication and applied linguists for the past three decades. Recognizing that academic writing is less objective and “author evacuated” than Geertz and others once supposed, analysts have sought to identify the ways that writers use language to acknowledge and construct social relations as they negotiate agreement of their interpretations of data with readers. Despite prolonged and widespread curiosity concerning the notion of stance, however, together with an interest in the gradual evolution of research genres more generally, very little is known of how it has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred uniformly across disciplines. In this article we set out to explore these issues. Drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from the top five journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we seek to determine whether authorial projection has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years.

Changing patterns of self-citation: Cumulative inquiry or self-promotion?

Abstract Self-citations are a familiar, if sometimes controversial, element of academic knowledge construction and reputation-building, contributing to both the cumulative nature of academic research and helping writers to promote their scientific authority and enhance their careers. As scholarly publications become more specialized, more collaborative and more important for promotion and tenure, we might expect self-citation to play a more visible role in published research and this paper explores this possibility. Here we trace patterns of self-citation in papers from the same five journals in four disciplines at three time periods over the past 50 years, selected according to their impact ranking in 2015. We identify a large increase in self-citations although this is subject to disciplinary variation and tempered by a huge rise in citations overall, so that self-citation has fallen as a proportion of all citations. We attempt to account for these changes and give a rhetorical explanation for authorial practices.