On the function of stance-neutral formulations: Apparent neutrality as a powerful stance constructing resource

•Neutral expressions serve as a strategic stance-building resource.•External viewpoints play a crucial role in constructing text.•Neutrally expressed external viewpoints effectively create a research space.•A gradual stance-building process simultaneously serves as a textual function.•Stance-neutral resources can flexibly realize different functional units.

This study explores the function of expressing external viewpoints with stance-neutral frames in academic writing. While a growing number of studies have established that appropriately evaluating external viewpoints is vital in advanced academic writing, the function of using stance-neutral formulations has long been unexplored despite the fact that many external viewpoints in academic writing are introduced into the discourse with a stance-neutral formulation. This study performs quantitative and qualitative analyses on the introductory chapters of PhD theses in history to explore the functions of these formulations. It finds that because of their absence of an evaluative stance, external propositions expressed without a specific stance flexibly realize various kinds of evaluative processes. Such processes involve taking into account the reader response to a proposition since the blankness in stance plays a role in constructing a discourse that gradually persuades the reader. This paper concludes that each of the neutrally presented viewpoints in the successfully constructed text uniquely forms an important strategic process of gradual value assignment and that stance-neutrality is not a representation of the writer's failure to clarify stance. This paper emphasizes the need to implement the strategic use of stance-neutral formulations in pedagogic settings.