A corpus-based study of the expression of stance in dissertation acknowledgements

Although much previous research has examined the expression of stance in different registers, it is restricted to such primary genres as published research articles, textbooks, and student essays. Little is known of the ways writers express stance in an underexplored academic genre - acknowledgements. Using a corpus-based approach, this present study builds on previous research, notably from Biber (2006), aiming to investigate to what extent the frequencies of the range of lexico-grammatical devices used for the expression of stance in acknowledgements vary across disciplines. In particular, it focuses on disciplinary writing practices of the soft and hard disciplines and on stance expressions with regard to social functions and lexico-grammatical patterns. A quantitative analysis shows important distributional trends of stance expressions across disciplines, with the soft disciplines using more stance features than the hard disciplines, and a qualitative analysis of selected concordance lines identifies various social functions and distinctive lexico-grammatical patterns. It is found that stance devices appear to be motivated by different factors such as the nature of research, the imbalance of the power and position between the writers and thanked addressees, the amount of assistance and support the writers receive from different sources, and their strategic career choices.