‘This mystery. . .’: a corpus-based study of the use of nouns to construct stance in theses from two contrasting disciplines  

Oleh:

Charles, Maggie

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of English for Academic Purposes (Full Text) vol. 2 no. 4 (2003), page 313–326.
Fulltext: Charles_Maggie.pdf (157.42KB)

Isi artikel

This study investigates the construction of stance through nouns in two corpora of theses, 200,000 words in politics/international relations and 300,000 words in materials science. It examines nouns which are preceded by sentence initial deictic This and which serve to encapsulate earlier propositions. Such forms are called ‘retrospective labels’ by Francis G. (1994). Labelling discourse: an aspect of nominal-group lexical cohesion. In M. Coulthard (Ed.), Advances in written text analysis (pp. 83–101). London: Routledge, and can be exemplified as follows: ‘Despite its lack of physical basis, the Potts model. . . has been very successful. . . This mystery. . .’. It is shown that through encapsulation, such nouns organise the text and indicate to the reader how the information is to be understood. In so doing they enable the writer to take a stance as a competent member of the discipline. Disciplinary differences are seen in the choice of noun, with higher frequencies in the politics corpus of both metalinguistic nouns (e.g. ‘argument’) and nouns that are inherently marked for stance (e.g. ‘confusion’). It is argued that this variation is due to differences between the disciplines in research practices and the construction of knowledge. I suggest that this use of nouns is important for thesis writers, as it constitutes a valuable resource for the construction of convincing arguments and the expression of appropriate stance.

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