Disciplinary and Gender Interactions: Corpus Analysis of Stance and Engagement in L2 Research Articles

Abstract

This study investigates the use of certain features of authorial stance and engagement in 40 recently published research articles in the disciplines of linguistics and literature written in English by male and female native speakers of Egyptian Arabic. The study adopts Hyland’s (2005b) Model of Interaction, complements it with his (1998b) Model of Scientific Hedging, and proposes an extension of the latter model to boosting devices. The freeware corpus analytic toolkit AntConc is used for concordancing and text analysis. The results revealed clear cross-disciplinary effects but only limited gender effects with regard to the type and frequency of the metadiscursive features under study. Furthermore, certain metadiscursive choices by writers in linguistics and literature were observed to be consistent with the discourse of empirical and non-empirical sciences, respectively..