Author Count, Author Gender, and Authorial Stance: A Corpus-based Analysis

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Allameh Tabataba'i University

2 Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Literature, University of Qom

Abstract

Numerous studies have corroborated the importance of metadiscourse in academic writing. As one of the main components of metadiscourse, stance has received fairly extensive attention recently. One of the questions in this regard (with conflicting results) has been the relationship between author gender and the use of stance markers. Moreover, the relationship between author count and stance markers in research articles has been extremely under-researched. Therefore, this study set out to investigate the relationship of author gender and author count with stance markers in the applied linguistics research articles. To this end, a corpus of 416 articles (with a total word count of over 2.6 million words) was used for the author count question. Of this large corpus, 199 articles were used for the gender-stance investigation. The normalized frequencies of stance markers were extracted using LancsBox corpus analysis software. Then, the obtained data was analyzed using Mann-Whitney test to shed light on the relationship of author gender and author count with authorial stance. Mixed results were obtained for the relationship of author count and authorial stance components (including hedges, boosters, self-mention markers, and attitude markers), while no significant result was obtained for the relationship between gender and stance.

Keywords

References

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Teaching English Language
Volume 16, Issue 1
January 2022
Pages 261-283

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History

  • Receive Date: 16 June 2022
  • Accept Date: 16 June 2022

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