AUTHORIAL STANCE AND EVALUATION IN RESEARCH ARTICLES:A QUALITATIVE CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS

Abstract

Authorial stance and evaluation are central to academic writing, as they enable writers to negotiate
authority, credibility, and engagement with readers; furthermore, they reflect the social and institutional
contexts in which knowledge is produced. However, despite extensive research on academic discourse,
gaps remain regarding authors’ conscious rationales for stance choices and the influence of institutional
factors beyond disciplinary norms. This study aims to examine how authors construct stance and evaluative
strategies in research articles; moreover, it seeks to interpret the relationship between linguistic markers
of stance and evaluation and the social and institutional context of scholarly writing. A qualitative corpusbased approach is employed, analyzing a purposively selected set of research articles across multiple
disciplines. Linguistic markers such as hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions are identified
and interpreted within their textual and institutional contexts; besides this, relevant theoretical frameworks,
including metadiscourse theory and evaluation theory, are used to guide analysis. The findings indicate
that authors strategically deploy hedging to express caution and boosters to assert confidence;
consequently, authority and credibility are negotiated through graded epistemic positioning, intertextual
alignment, and methodological transparency. Institutional factors, such as journal prestige and author
affiliation, further shape stance construction; similarly, disciplinary norms influence the degree of
authorial presence and evaluative intensity. Overall, authorial stance is a dynamic, socially embedded, and
strategic feature of academic writing that mediates knowledge construction and scholarly interaction. The
study recommends integrating explicit instruction on stance and evaluation in academic writing curricula;
moreover, future research should combine corpus analysis with author interviews to explore the cognitive
and intentional dimensions of stance choices.