“We must conclude that…”:A diachronic study of academic engagement

Engagement is the way that writers explicitly acknowledge the presence of their readers in a text, drawing them in through readermention, personal asides, appeals to shared knowledge, questions and directives. This is a key rhetorical feature of academic writing and has been a topic of interest to applied linguists for over 20 years. Despite this interest, however, very little is known of how it has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred across different disciplines. Are academic texts becoming more interactional and if so in what ways and in what fields? 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 look for answers to these questions to determine whether reader engagement has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years. Our paper presents, and attempts to account for, some surprising variations and an overall decline in explicit engagement during this period

Points of Reference: Changing Patterns of Academic Citation

In this article we explore the ways in which academic citation practices have changed over the past 50 years. Based on the analysis of a corpus of 2.2 million words from the same leading journals in four disciplines in 1965, 1985, and 2015, we document a substantial rise in citations over the period, particularly in applied linguistics and sociology. This is partly because there is now so much more research to report and that recognizing previous work is much easier as a result of electronic access and hyperlinks to sources. But citation is also increasingly required as a means of appropriately embedding research more securely in disciplinary understandings. Our results also show a fall in the use of reporting structures, a growing preference for non-integral forms, for research verbs, for the present tense, and for non-evaluative structures when reporting others’ research. While patterns differ by discipline, there is a general trend towards writers suppressing human agency in knowledge-making and emphasizing the reported studies rather than those who conducted them to show how earlier research supports their own

Metadiscursive nouns: Interaction and cohesion in abstract moves

Research article abstracts have become an important genre in all knowledge fields, playing a crucial role in persuading readers, and reviewers, to take the time to go further into the paper itself. This promotional aspect of abstracts is well known, but less discussed is the ways writers are able to skilfully foreground their claim, package the information in a cohesive and coherent manner, and craft a disciplinary stance. One such rhetorical strategy is what we are calling metadiscursive nouns. Nouns such as fact, analysis, and belief are common in abstracts and do a great deal of rhetorical work for writers. In this paper we explore the interactive and interactional functions they perform in the rhetorical moves of 240 research abstracts from six disciplines. The results show how these nouns are frequently used to frame and coherently manage arguments while, at the same time, helping writers to claim disciplinary legitimacy and promote the value and relevance of their research to their discipline

Academic lexical bundles: How are they changing?

An important component of fluent linguistic production and a key distinguishing feature of particular modes, registers and genres is the multi-word expressions referred to as ‘lexical bundles’. These are extended collocations which appear more frequently than expected by chance, helping to shape meanings and contributing to our sense of coherence and distinctiveness in a text. These strings have been studied extensively, particularly in academic writing in English, but little is known about how they may have changed over time. In this paper we explore changes in their use and frequency over the past 50 years, drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from top research journals in four disciplines. We find that bundles are not static and invariant markers of research writing but change in response to new conditions and contexts, with the most interesting changes within disciplines. The paper also discusses methodological approaches to studying bundles diachronically

Is academic writing becoming more informal?

Informality has become something of a contemporary mantra as, from the denim-clad offices of internet startups to the pages of business reports, we are encouraged to shed old constraints and relax conventions. This paper explores the perception that since informality has now invaded a large range of written and spoken domains of discourse, academic writing has also followed this trend. It asks the question whether academics are now freer to construct less rigidly objective texts and craft a more inclusive relationship with their readers. Taking a corpus of 2.2 million words from the same leading journals in four disciplines at three periods over the past years, we explore changes in the use of ten key features regarded by applied linguists and style guide authors as representing informality. Our results show only a small increase in the use of these features, and that this is mainly accounted for by increases in the hard sciences rather than the social sciences. It is also largely restricted to increases in first person pronouns, unattended reference and sentences beginning with conjunctions. We discuss these results and argue they represent changes in rhetorical conventions which accommodate more obvious interpersonal interactions in the sciences

Change of Attitude? A Diachronic Study of Stance

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

Changing patterns of self-citation: Cumulative inquiry or self-promotion?

Self-citations are a familiar, if sometimes controversial, element of academic knowledge construction and reputation-building, contributing to both the cumulative nature of academic re-search and helping writers to promote their scientific authority and enhance their careers. As scholarly publications become more specialised, more collaborative and more important for promotion and tenure, we might expect self-citation to play a more visible role in published research and this paper explores this possibility. Here we trace patterns of self-citation in papers from the same five journals in four disciplines at three-time periods over the past 50 years, selected according to their impact ranking in 2015. We identify a large increase in self-citations although this is subject to disciplinary variation and tempered by a huge rise in citations overall, so that self-citation has fallen as a proportion of all citations. We attempt to ac-count for these changes and give a rhetorical explanation for authorial practices

‘We believe that … ’: Changes in an academic stance marker

This paper explores changes in the use of an important pattern used by writers in all disciplines to present an authorial stance: the structure Hyland and Tse call evaluative that. This construction allows writers to front-load utterances with attitudinal meanings and offer an explicit evaluation of the proposition which follows. Linguists have tended to regard this as separate patterns, but seeing it as a single structure of a matrix clause [evaluation] + that clause [evaluated entity] enables us to recognize a single evaluative purpose with a variety of rhetorical options for writers. Here we examine the contribution of this explicit that pattern to the key genre of the academy, the research article, and map changes in its use and frequency over the past 50 years, drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from four disciplines. We find that this structure is widely employed in these papers, with an average of 53 cases per paper in the 2015 data, but occurrences per 10,000 words have declined by about 20% with fairly uniform falls across disciplines. We track these diachronic and disciplinary changes and seek to explain them in terms of changing rhetorical practices

“There are significant differences…”: the secret life of existential there in academic writing

While numerous interactive aspects of academic writing have attracted attention in recent years, one common feature which has escaped scrutiny is "existential there" (as in "there are significant differences"). Based on a corpus of 80 research articles from four disciplines, this study explores the 'secret life' of this construction, revealing how academic writers use it to organise their arguments and persuade peers of their claims. In contrast to the style guides which regard existential there as an "empty structure" to be avoided, our data show that academic authors make considerable use of it across different sections of the research article to achieve their persuasive purposes. We also discuss differences in how writers in different disciplines favour diverse accompanying head nouns to foreground the particular aspect of information their readers are likely to find most familiar and persuasive. We conclude that existential there is a key feature in the academic author's rhetorical toolbox, allowing them to build interaction with readers and claim credit for their ideas. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

“The goal of this analysis …”: Changing patterns of metadiscursive nouns in disciplinary writing.

The last 50 years have seen considerable changes in both research and publication practices in international English-medium arenas, and also witnessed a shift in argument styles in academic texts over these years (e.g. Hyland & Jiang, 2019). However, little attention was given to the rhetorical roles of nouns in diachronic studies of professional research writing. This is surprising since academic writing is an extremely noun-heavy register and novice writers often find nominal expressions difficult. In this study, we examine what are called metadiscursive nouns, a type of unspecific abstract nouns, in our diachronic corpus of disciplinary research writing to see whether they have increased in recent decades. It is found that this N pattern is most frequent overall, but hard scientists made increased use of quality nouns to promote the value of their research outcome while writers in the soft disciplines prefer evidential nouns for factual support to their knowledge claims. All these point to the need to include metadiscursive nouns into the rhetorical repertoire of metadiscourse and to emphasise their functions in the course of using English for research and publication purposes