A Diachronic Study of Stance Markers in the English Abstracts of Linguistic Research Articles
As a concise and efficient academic genre for promoting research,the abstracts of research articles(RAs)have received wide-spread scholarly attention.However,most of the studies on the abstracts of RAs have focused on their macro rhetorical moves and metadiscourse separately,and few of them have examined the features of stance markers within the moves of abstract from the dia-chronic perspective.Therefore,we carried out a diachronic analysis of the stance markers over the past 20 years(2002-2022)based on a small-size self-built corpus of the English abstracts of RAs.A total of 1378 English abstracts of RAs on linguistic studies were taken from 8 top journals of foreign language studies in China.Results revealed that over the 20-year period,the frequency of hedges increased significantly in the Purpose move;the frequency of boosters increased slightly in the Result move and decreased slightly in the other moves;the frequency of self-mentions decreased significantly in all the moves;and the frequency of attitude markers changed slightly.The results indicated that stance-making strategies and the way of knowledge construction in linguistic studies in China had shifted in the past 20 years and were becoming internationalized.The study may provide some references for understanding the use of stance markers at the move-structure level,and may shed light on the teaching of academic writing.
RA abstractslinguistic studiesstance markersmovediachronic studycorpusinternationalization
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
