Constructing academic caution and authorial positioning: a corpus-based analysis of hedging and stance markers in BAWE essays

Abstract

The current study explores hedging and stance resources in the BAWE corpus to analyse how successful undergraduates achieve academic caution and writer stance in their writing. Based on Hyland’s (2005) model of interactional metadiscourse, this research follows the quantitative corpus-based approach and analyses four types of stance resources: hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions. In total, twelve argumentative and literary analysis essays containing 25,987 words have been analysed via AntConc using frequency, concordance, collocation, and functional analysis. Results show that hedges are the most frequent type of stance markers (42.5%), followed by boosters (20.5%), attitude markers (19.0%) and self-mentions (18.0%), suggesting that successful students prefer to use cautious and tentative argumentation rather than categorical assertions. Analysis of concordance and collocation patterns proves that modal verbs like would, could, may and should are mainly used to denote possibility, hypotheses and tentative interpretation. At the same time, boosters serve as the means of reinforcing claims based on evidence. Evaluative judgment and construction of an authoritative academic writer are achieved by means of attitude markers and self-mentions. This research is important to both corpus linguistics and English for Academic Purposes because it offers empirical data on the rhetorical roles of stance markers in successful academic writing and emphasises the significance of using corpus linguistics methods in teaching students how to write academically and persuasively.