Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus LinguisticsVol. 22:1 (2017) ► pp.85–106
Stance and voice in academic writing
The “noun + that” construction and disciplinary variation
Stance and voice are two crucial elements of social interactions in academic writing. However, their conceptual constructs are elusive and their linguistic realisation is not fully explored. A relatively overlooked feature is the “noun + that” structure, where a stance head noun takes a nominal complement clause (as advantage that in Flow cytometry offers the advantage that long term is available). This construction allows a writer to express authorial stance towards complement content and attribute a voice to that stance through pre-modification. This paper examines this construction in a corpus of 60 journal articles across six disciplines extracted from the BNC corpus. Developing an expressive classification of stance nouns and the possible voice categorisation, this study shows that the structure is not only widely used to project stance and voice, but that it displays considerable variation in the way that it is used to build knowledge across different disciplines.
Keywords: stance, voice, academic writing, “noun + that” construction, argument
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Stance and voice in academic writing
- 3.“Noun + that” construction
- 4.Corpus, categorisation and analysis
- 5.Stance expressions through choice of head nouns
- 6.Voice projection through averal, attribution or concealment
- 7.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
This article is currently available as a sample article.
References (58)
Aktas, R. N., & Cortes, V. (2008). Shell nouns as cohesive devices in published and ESL student writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 7(1), 3–14. 
Anthony, L. (2014). AntConc (Version 3.4.3w) [Computer Software]. Tokyo: Waseda University.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Bazerman, C. (1988). Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press Madison.
Becher, T., & Trowler, P. (2001). Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines. Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press.
Biber, D., & Finegan, E. (1989). Styles of stance in English: Lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect. Text, 9(1), 93–124.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Written and Spoken English. Harlow: Longman.
Burgess, A., & Ivanič, R. (2010). Writing and being written: Issues of identity across timescales. Written Communication, 27(2), 228–255.
Chafe, W., & Nichols, J. (1986). Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. Orwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing.
Channell, J. (1994). Vague Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Charles, M. (2006). The construction of stance in reporting clauses: A cross-disciplinary study of theses. Applied Linguistics, 27(3), 492–518.
(2007). Argument or evidence? Disciplinary variation in the use of the noun “that” pattern in stance construction. English for Specific Purposes, 26(2), 203–218.
Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. Tesol Quarterly, 34(2), 213–238.
Dryer, M. S. (1996). Focus, pragmatic presupposition, and activated propositions. Journal of Pragmatics, 26(4), 475–523.
Fløttum, K., Dahl, T., & Kinn, T. (2006). Academic Voices: Across Languages and Disciplines. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Flowerdew, J. (2003). Signalling nouns in discourse. English for Specific Purposes, 22(4), 329–346.
(2010). Use of signalling nouns across L1 and L2 writer corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 15(1), 36–55.
Francis, G. (1986). Anaphoric Nouns. Birmingham: English Language Research, University of Birmingham.
Gilbert, G. N., & Mulkay, M. (1984). Opening Pandora’s Box: A Sociological Analysis of Scientists’ Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics (pp. 41–58). New York, NY: Academic Press.
Guinda, C. S., & Hyland, K. (2012). Introduction: A context-sensitive approach to stance and voice. In K. Hyland & C. Guinda, Sancho (Eds.), Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres (pp. 1–11). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1993a). The analysis of scientific texts in English and Chinese. In M. A. K. Halliday & J. R. Martin (Eds.), Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power (pp. 137–146). London: Falmer Press.
(1993b). The construction of knowledge and value in the grammar of scientific discourse: Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species
. In M. A. K. Halliday & J. R. Martin (Eds.), Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power (pp. 95–116). London: Falmer Press.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Martin, J. R. (1993). Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. London: Falmer Press.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2014). Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar (4th ed.). London: Taylor & Francis.
Hinkel, E. (2004). Teaching Academic ESL Writing: Practical Techiniques in Vocabulary & Grammar. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Hudson, R. (2013). The struggle with voice in scientific writing. Journal of Chemical Education, 90(12), 1580–1580.
Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation and the planes of discourse: Status and value in persuasive texts. In S. Hunston & G. Thompson (Eds.), Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse (pp. 176–207). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hyland, K. (2001). Humble servants of the discipline? Self-mention in research articles. English for Specific Purposes, 20(3), 207–226.
(2002). Authority and invisibility: Authorial identity in academic writing. Journal of Pragmatics, 34(8), 1091–1112.
(2004). Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
(2005a). Metadiscourse: Exploring Interaction in Writing. London: Continuum.
(2005b). Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies, 7(2), 173–192.
(2008). Disciplinary voices: Interactions in research writing. English Text Construction, 1(1), 5–22.
(2012). Disciplinary Identities: Individuality and Community in Academic Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hyland, K., & Guinda, C. S. (2012). Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (2005). Evaluative that constructions: Signalling stance in research abstracts. Functions of Language, 12(1), 39–63.
Ivanič, R. (1991). Nouns in search of a context: A study of nouns with both open-and closed-system characteristics. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 29(2), 93–114.
(1998). Writing and Identity: The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Ivanič, R., & Camps, D. (2001). I am how I sound: Voice as self-representation in L2 writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 10(1), 3–33.
Jiang, K. F., & Hyland, K. (2015). ‘The fact that’: Stance nouns in disciplinary writing. Discourse Studies, 17(5), 529–550.
MAXQDAplus. (2012) (Version 11) [Computer software]. Berlin: VERBI GmbH.
Matsuda, P. K., & Tardy, C. M. (2007). Voice in academic writing: The rhetorical construction of author identity in blind manuscript review. English for Specific Purposes, 26(2), 235–249.
McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2011). Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nesi, H., & Moreton, E. (2012). EFL/ESL writers and the use of shell nouns. In R. Tang (Ed.), Academic Writing in a Second or Foreign Language (pp. 126–145). London: Continuum.
Parkinson, J. (2013). Representing own and other voices in social science research articles. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 18(2), 199–228.
Petrić, B. (2010). Students’ conceptions of voice in academic writing. In R. Lorés-Sanz, P. Mur-Dueñas & E. Lafuente-Millán (Eds.), Constructing Interpersonality: Multiple Perspectives on Written Academic Genres (pp. 324–336). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Prelli, L. J. (1989). A Rhetoric of Science: Inventing Scientific Discourse. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press
Ramanathan, V., & Atkinson, D. (1999). Individualism, academic writing, and ESL writers. Journal of Second Language Writing, 8(1), 45–75.
Schmid, H. -J. (2000). English Abstract Nouns as Conceptual Shells: From Corpus to Cognition. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Sinclair, J. M. (1986). Fictional worlds. In M. Coulthard (Ed.), Talking about Text (pp. 43–60). Birmingham: University of Birmingham.
Swales, J. M. (2004). Research Genres: Explorations and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tadros, A. (1993). The pragmatics of text averral and attribution in academic texts. In M. Hoey (Ed.), Data, Description, Discourse (pp. 98–114). London: HarperCollins.
Tardy, C. M., & Matsuda, P. K. (2009). The construction of author voice by editorial board members. Written Communication, 26(1), 32–52.
Thompson, G., & Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: An introduction. In S. Hunston & G. Thompson (Eds.), Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse (pp. 1–27). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thompson, G., & Ye, Y. Y. (1991). Evaluation in the reporting verbs used in academic papers. Applied Linguistics, 12(4), 365–382.
Winter, E. O. (1982). Towards a Contextual Grammar of English: The Clause and its Place in the Definition of Sentence. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Cited by (25)
Cited by 25 other publications
Dong, Youneng, Jingjing Wang & Feng (Kevin) Jiang
2024. Epistemic positioning by science students and experts: a divide by applied and pure disciplines. Applied Linguistics Review 15:3 ► pp. 927 ff. 
Han, Hao & Natalia Mikhailovna Dugalich
2024. Self-mention in Chinese linguistic MA novices’ and experts’ academic writing: A corpus-driven investigation of ‘we’. Litera :4 ► pp. 182 ff.
Jin, Guangsa, Chenle Li & Ya Sun
2024. Developing a genre-based research article reading module for undergraduate students. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 72 ► pp. 101448 ff.
Pan, Fan & Yiying Yang
2024. Diachronic changes in the phrasal complexity of research articles (1970–2020): a cross-disciplinary investigation. Scientometrics 129:7 ► pp. 4395 ff.
Abbasi Montazeri, Ebtesam, Alireza Jalilifar & Jorge Arus Hita
2023. Evaluative language in applied linguistics research article discussions: exploring the functions and patterns of that-structures in argumentative texts. Language Awareness 32:2 ► pp. 193 ff.
Deng, Liming & Ping He
2023. “We may conclude that:” a corpus-based study of stance-taking in conclusion sections of RAs across cultures and disciplines. Frontiers in Psychology 14
Liu, Xueying & Haoran Zhu
2023. Linguistic positivity in soft and hard disciplines: temporal dynamics, disciplinary variation, and the relationship with research impact. Scientometrics 128:5 ► pp. 3107 ff.
Lorés, Rosa
2023. Dual voices, hybrid identities: the recontextualization of research in digital dissemination scientific discourse. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 93 ► pp. 69 ff.
Qi, Qi & Cecilia Guanfang Zhao
2023. Discoursal scholarly identity in research writing. Journal of Second Language Writing 62 ► pp. 101052 ff.
Zhang, Weiyu & Yin Ling Cheung
2023. The different ways to write publishable research articles: Using cluster analysis to uncover patterns of APPRAISAL in discussions across disciplines. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 63 ► pp. 101231 ff.
Cañada Pujols, Maria Dolors & Carme Bach
2022. Marcadores metadiscursivos interaccionales en resúmenes de TFG: ¿indicadores de dominio del género?. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 90 ► pp. 5 ff.
Hyland, Ken & Feng (Kevin) Jiang
2022. Metadiscourse choices in EAP: An intra-journal study of JEAP. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 60 ► pp. 101165 ff.
Hyland, Ken, Wenbin Wang & Feng (Kevin) Jiang
2022. Metadiscourse across languages and genres: An overview. Lingua 265 ► pp. 103205 ff.
Simanjuntak, Risa Rumentha
2022. Revealing the rhetorical moves and linguistic patterns in discipline-related undergraduate thesis. JOALL (Journal of Applied Linguistics and Literature) 7:2 ► pp. 345 ff.
Simanjuntak, Risa Rumentha
2025. Claiming Importance of Research: A Corpus Linguistics Analysis on Indonesian Students’ Research Papers. In Applied Linguistics in the Indonesian Context [Engaging Indonesia, ], ► pp. 155 ff.
Zhang, Yimin & Hang Su
2022. “We define X as …”: A local grammar of definition in linguistics research articles and its pedagogical value. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 59 ► pp. 101143 ff.
Alghazo, Sharif, Mohd Nour Al Salem & Imran Alrashdan
2021. Stance and engagement in English and Arabic research article abstracts. System 103 ► pp. 102681 ff.
Birhan, Amare Tesfie
2021. An exploration of metadiscourse usage in book review articles across three academic disciplines: a contrastive analysis of corpus-based research approach. Scientometrics 126:4 ► pp. 2885 ff.
Curry, Niall & Pascual Pérez-Paredes
2021. Stance nouns in COVID-19 related blog posts. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 26:4 ► pp. 469 ff.
Jiang, Feng (Kevin) & Ken Hyland
2021. ‘The goal of this analysis …’: Changing patterns of metadiscursive nouns in disciplinary writing. Lingua 252 ► pp. 103017 ff.
Qiu, Xuyan & Feng (Kevin) Jiang
2021. Stance and engagement in 3MT presentations: How students communicate disciplinary knowledge to a wide audience. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 51 ► pp. 100976 ff.
Rørvik, Sylvi
2021. Cross-disciplinary and cross-linguistic uses of tensed verb phrases in the methods sections of master’s theses. In Time in Languages, Languages in Time [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 101], ► pp. 255 ff.
Biber, Douglas & Susan Conrad
2019. Register, Genre, and Style,
Dong, Jihua & Louisa Buckingham
2018. The collocation networks of stance phrases. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 36 ► pp. 119 ff.
Simaki, Vasiliki, Carita Paradis & Andreas Kerren
2018. Evaluating stance-annotated sentences from the Brexit Blog Corpus: A quantitative linguistic analysis. ICAME Journal 42:1 ► pp. 133 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 november 2024. 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.