Written Communication Jul 2016 Open Access

Change of Attitude? A Diachronic Study of Stance

Ken Hyland University of Hong Kong ; Feng (Kevin) Jiang

Abstract

Successful research writers construct texts by taking a novel point of view toward the issues they discuss while anticipating readers’ imagined reactions to those views. This intersubjective positioning is encompassed by the term stance and, in various guises, has been a topic of interest to researchers of written communication and applied linguists for the past three decades. Recognizing that academic writing is less objective and “author evacuated” than Geertz and others once supposed, analysts have sought to identify the ways that writers use language to acknowledge and construct social relations as they negotiate agreement of their interpretations of data with readers. Despite prolonged and widespread curiosity concerning the notion of stance, however, together with an interest in the gradual evolution of research genres more generally, very little is known of how it has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred uniformly across disciplines. In this article we set out to explore these issues. Drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from the top five journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we seek to determine whether authorial projection has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years.

Journal
Written Communication
Published
2016-07-01
DOI
10.1177/0741088316650399
Open Access
OA PDF Green
Topics
writing across the curriculum

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (9)

  1. Hyland et al. (2026)
    Stance in REF Submissions: Authorial Positioning in Impact Narratives
    Written Communication
  2. Tham (2026)
    Exploring the Rhetorical and Agentive Functions of Scholarly Biosketches in Aca…
    Rhetoric Review
  3. Wang et al. (2025)
    Getting to “the Upper End of the Novice Zone”: An Exploration of Doctoral Stude…
    Written Communication
  4. Hint et al. (2025)
    Decoding Metadiscourse Markers in Estonian Academic Texts: A Language-Specific …
    Written Communication
  5. Wang et al. (2024)
    Exploring the Interpersonal Functions of Negation in Science Writing Across 35 Years
    Written Communication
Show all 9 →
  1. Jiang et al. (2023)
    Changes in Research Abstracts: Past Tense, Third Person, Passive, and Negatives
    Written Communication
  2. Castelló et al. (2021)
    Post-PhD Researchers’ Trajectories and Networking: The Mediating Role of Writin…
    Written Communication
  3. Aull (2019)
    Linguistic Markers of Stance and Genre in Upper-Level Student Writing
    Written Communication
  4. Ross (2018)
    Environmental Impact Communication: Cape Wind EIS, 2001–2015
    Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

Cites in this index (3)

  1. Aull et al. (2014)
    Linguistic Markers of Stance in Early and Advanced Academic Writing
    Written Communication
  2. Lancaster (2014)
    Exploring Valued Patterns of Stance in Upper-Level Student Writing in the Disciplines
    Written Communication
  3. Uccelli et al. (2013)
    Mastering Academic Language
    Written Communication
Also cites 21 works outside this index ↓
  1. 10.1177/030631284014002001
     ↗
  2. 10.1146/annurev.an.19.100190.002223
     ↗
  3. 10.1075/scl.23
     ↗
  4. 10.1515/text.1.1989.9.1.93
     ↗
  5. 10.1017/CBO9780511920776
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  6. 10.1093/applin/aml021
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  10. 10.1075/ijcl.4.2.02hun
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CrossRef global citation count: 190 View in citation network →

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