ABSTRACT
Taking appropriate stance is crucial for successful academic writing. Experienced academic writers have been found to use various metadiscoursal resources skilfully to signal their authorial stance in line with prevalent disciplinary and paradigmatic knowledge-making practices. Little research however has examined how disciplines and research paradigms relate to the multifunctionality of stance markers. To bridge the gap this chapter reports on a corpus-based study of the various functions of three types of stance markers – hedges boosters and self-mentions – in the post-method sections of 120 quantitative qualitative and mixed-methods research articles in psychology and applied linguistics. Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed clear disciplinary and paradigmatic differences in the functions of these multifunctional metadiscursive resources. Applied linguists displayed a more authoritative tone and stronger commitment than psychologists by using more writer- and content-oriented boosters to conceal authorial subjectivity and to stress the reliability of the propositional content respectively. Psychologists used more self-mentions when referring to research entities presenting results and elaborating arguments. Quantitative research appeared more tentative and provisional than qualitative research as a result of making more frequent use of all sub-functions of hedges with mixed-methods research falling somewhere in between. In addition qualitative research employed more self-mentions as discourse guides whereas quantitative and mixed-methods research used more self-mentions in recounting procedures. These results are interpreted in terms of the prevalent epistemological assumptions underpinning knowledge-making practices in the disciplines and the research paradigms. The chapter concludes with implications for further research and the teaching of multifunctional metadiscursive resources in EAP courses.
