Stance in English Research Articles: Two Disciplines of the Same Science

Research in academic writing has revealed a strong tendency on the part of writers to interactively communicate their stance with their readers. This study targets the stance component of writer-reader interaction by integrating Hyland’s (2005b) and Hyland and Tse’s (2005) frameworks to investigate psychology and sociology English research articles; the former for lexical stance markers and the latter for grammatical evaluative that construction. The corpus included 100 English research articles published during 2012-2014, 50 from each field, yielding a total number of 922,400 words. The data were first analyzed by AntConc (Anthony, 2014) and, to ensure maximum reliability, a crosscheck was carried out by the researchers to discard the anomalies. Moreover, chi-square was run to compare the results. The results suggested remarkable similarities and significant differences between those disciplines. Based on the findings, some implications are drawn with plausible applicability in academic writing and EAP syllabus design. Finally, suggestions are put forward for future research.