Authorial Stance in Research Articles

Research on academic writing in general, and on the research article genre in particular, has investigated the generic structure of the Abstract, or of the Introduction section of the research article, with little attention being paid to other sections (Methods, Results, Discussion and Conclusions). Using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, this work investigates the move structures of all the sections of the research article, including the Abstract. The book explores the sequencing and structure of moves, and shows how linguistic features are used to realize authorial stance in the moves. It reveals that there are some differences between the two closely related disciplines in terms of move structure and typical linguistic features of moves. However, more significant is the finding that authorial stance, as expressed in linguistic realizations of moves, varies systematically across moves in both disciplines.