Stance nouns in COVID-19 related blog posts

Abstract

Research dissemination through academic blogs creates opportunities for writers to reach wider audiences. With COVID-19, public dissemination of research impacts daily practices, and national and international policies, and in countries like the UK and Spain, The Conversation publishes accessible COVID-19 themed research. Such academic blogs are important to the global academy, yet the role of authorial stance therein is notably under-investigated. This paper presents a corpus-based contrastive analysis of “stance nouns + that/de que” in a comparable corpus of English and Spanish COVID-19 themed academic blogs from The Conversation. The analysis identifies similarities and differences across languages that reflect how COVID-19 is framed in each language. For example, Spanish academics use Possibility and Factualness nouns when self-sourcing their stances with expanding strategies, while English academics use Argument and Idea nouns with external sources in contracting strategies. Overall, this paper adds to current linguistic knowledge on academic blogs and scientific communication surrounding COVID-19.

Interdisciplinary variations of metadiscursive verb patterns in English research articles

“…To a large extent, this is perhaps one of the most widely employed methods for approaching specialist written texts (Hyland, 2017). Recent years have witnessed its significant contribution to the study of academic discourse and genre analysis, from research articles and textbooks (e.g., Hu & Cao, 2011; Hyland, 2019; Hyland & Jiang, 2022), academic essays and examination writing (e.g., Chung et al., 2023; Ho & Li, 2018; Lee & Deakin, 2016), to newspaper discourse (e.g., Breeze, 2016; Chen & Huang, 2023; Shokouhi et al., 2015) and academic blogs (e.g., Curry & Perez‐Paredes, 2021; Hyland & Zou, 2020; Zou & Hyland, 2020), covering both spoken communication and written registers.…”