EPISTEMIC MARKERS OF STANCE IN ENGINEERING AND LANGUAGE RESEARCH ARTICLES
EPISTEMIC MARKERS OF STANCE IN ENGINEERING AND LANGUAGE RESEARCH ARTICLES

Summary/Abstract: Research articles offer ample resources for the investigation of rhetorical, discursive and social practices of their focus disciplines. Generic conventions, schematic structure and the relationships between authors and the targeted reader of the academic text have been the subjects of many theoretical studies of academic writing in various disciplines. The latter area of interest has been particularly influenced by the seminal work of Hyland (2000, 2005) and Hyland & Bondi (2006) into contextualizing academic discourse and relating it to disciplinary practices of their respective professional and academic communities. Writers, readers and other stakeholders are seen as active participants in the construction of meaning in academic texts, enacting and re-constructing disciplinary practices in the writing of their disciplines. Moreover, interaction in academic writing is not exclusively a means of catering for the informative needs of a discipline’s expert community, but a playground for evaluating previous knowledge claims, for making new claims, for outlining a professional persona and for claiming membership rights. Thus, the interpersonal function of language becomes apparent in academic texts of various disciplines, even where impersonal and objective discourse is supposedly the norm. Recent studies of academic discourse focused on aspects such as hedging, power and engagement features or metadiscoursive features which have foregrounded an all pervasive interpersonal function of academic writing, challenging stereotypes such as ‘facts speak for themselves’. The author voices his opinion, wishes and claims most distinctively, constructs a carefully planned identity and moulds it on the patterns build by the expert community he addresses his claims to. The present paper attempts to investigate how modulation of claims is achieved in academic texts of two very different disciplines: engineering and language. Studying two corpora of research ·...´

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