Variation and Diachronic Change in Epistemic Stance: Testing Promotional Trends in NSF Grant Proposal Abstracts

Abstract

Although epistemic stance in academic discourse has been extensively researched in linguistics, relatively little is known about diachronic change and variation in its expression across disciplines, and still less about the grant proposal abstract, a genre produced under strong promotional pressure. The present paper addresses this gap by testing whether the widely reported trend towards research “hype” is reflected in the epistemic stance of grant proposal abstracts and, if so, whether it is uniform across disciplines. We examined three groups of epistemic stance expressions (hedges, boosters, and modal auxiliaries) in a 99.4-million-word corpus of openly available abstracts of successful NSF grant proposals representing seven disciplinary groups (biological sciences, computer and information science, engineering, geosciences, mathematical and physical sciences, social, behavioral and economic sciences, and education) and spanning the period 1987–2024. Using Kendall’s tau and linear regression, complemented by autocorrelation diagnostics, we established whether there is a consistent upward or downward trend in the incidence of these features in each discipline over time and estimated the size of the differences. The results complicate the picture drawn by existing discipline-specific studies of epistemic stance. Contrary to the upward trend observed in medical research abstracts, the frequency of boosters decreases consistently across four disciplines and in the corpus overall; the frequency of hedges follows a comparable downward trajectory, and modal auxiliaries decline overall, a trend accounted for largely by the high-frequency future marker will, though one that falls short of our consistency criterion, while individual modals move in opposite directions. These findings suggest that trends in the expression of epistemic stance are highly dependent on discipline and genre, and that the assumption that the language of research is becoming uniformly less cautious and more promotional merits comprehensive, cross-disciplinary empirical examination. The study contributes to ESP research by demonstrating that the promotionalisation of academic writing does not operate uniformly across professional genres and disciplines.