2

Current Conceptions of Stance

Bethany Gray and Douglas Biber
Iowa State University and Northern Arizona University

Introduction

The linguistic mechanisms that convey a speaker or writers personal

attitudes and assessments have long been of interest to linguists, and
several major approaches to this function of language have been taken.
In this chapter we survey several related threads of research, including
evidentiality (e.g. Chafe, 1986), affect (e.g. Ochs and Schieffelin, 1989),
hedging (e.g. Hyland, 1998b), evaluation (e.g. Thompson and Hunston,
2000), appraisal (e.g. Martin, 2000) and stance (e.g. Biber and Finegan,
1989). While each paradigm has its own focus and approach, this body
of research as a whole contributes to our understanding of the ways in
which speakers and writers encode opinions and assessments in the language they produce. In this chapter, we will refer to this overall concept
as stance. Studies within these paradigms have been conducted with a
variety of methodologies, ranging from detailed analyses of a single text
to large-scale investigations of patterns across texts in a corpus, as well
as from detailed analyses of a single linguistic item or feature to descriptions of a large set of lexical and grammatical features. Taken together,
these studies show that the expression of stance varies along two major
parameters:
(1) meaning of the assessment: personal feeling/attitude status of
knowledge
(2) linguistic level used for the assessment: lexical grammatical
In Section 2, we explore Parameter 1 (the meaning of assessment) in
further detail, considering both personal attitudes (attitudinal stance)
and assessments of certainty and doubt (epistemic stance). In particular,
15

K. Hyland et al. (eds.), Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres

Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2012

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Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres

we focus on the role that epistemic stance (the status of knowledge

end of the cline) plays in academic writing. In Section 3, we discuss the
linguistic realizations of stance (Parameter 2), focusing on the issues of
explicitness and implicitness in stance markers. Section 4 summarizes
previous research on the role of stance devices in academic writing,
commenting on comparisons to other spoken and written registers and
considering previous findings and new directions for stance research in
academic writing.

2 Conceptions of stance: from personal attitudes to the

status of knowledge
Throughout the last three decades, research into the linguistic marking
of stance has been approached under a range of terms, including intensity (Labov, 1984), posture (Grabe, 1984), disjuncts (Quirk et al., 1985),
hedges (Brown and Levinson, 1987), modality (Palmer, 1986; Bybee and
Fleischman, 1995) and (inter)subjectivity (White, 2003; Fitzmaurice,
2004; Lyons, 1993). Two lines of research, however, have been particularly foundational in todays conceptions of stance: evidentiality (Chafe,
1986; Chafe and Nichols, 1986) and affect (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1989;
Besnier, 1990).
In a broad sense, evidentiality refers to the status of the knowledge
contained in propositions. In the first major research to consider evidentiality in English, Chafe (1986) outlines a multifaceted approach,
discussing the linguistic indicators of four major components of
attitudes towards knowledge:
1. The degree of reliability of knowledge;
2. The source of knowledge, such as evidence, the language of others,
and hypotheses;
3. The manner in which the knowledge was acquired (mode of knowing), which includes personal beliefs, induction or inference from
evidence, hearsay from what we have heard or learned from others,
and deduction from hypotheses;
4. The appropriateness of the verbal resources for marking evidential
meaning, in terms of both the match between the linguistic markers
and the actual status of the knowledge, as well as the match with
reader/hearer expectations.
Around this same time, researchers were also beginning to investigate the linguistic realizations of affect: feelings, moods, dispositions,

Bethany Gray and Douglas Biber

17

and attitudes associated with persons and/or situations (Ochs and

Schieffelin, 1989: 7). Ochs and Schieffelin identify two types of affect
markers, those which indicate the intensity of an utterance and those
which specify a particular attitude or emotion such as sorrow, surprise,
anger, and so on. In contrast to evidentiality, affect markers express
personal feelings, emotions and attitudes rather than evaluations of
knowledge.
Biber and Finegan (1988, 1989) noticed that the same set of grammatical devices were used in English to realize the functions of evidentiality and affect, and thus they brought the two concepts together into a
broader model of stance, encompassing personal attitudes and emotions
as well as assessments of the status of knowledge. Stance functions have
played a prominent role in the multidimensional analyses of register
variation in every language studied to date (including English, Somali,
Korean and Tuvaluan; see Biber, 1988; 1995: 24952). As a result, Biber
and Finegan (1988, 1989) undertook more detailed corpus-based investigations of stance features in a range of spoken and written registers,
categorizing linguistic features according to a two-way distinction
within affective and evidential meanings. Affect meanings could be
either positive (e.g. fortunate, enjoy, happily) or negative (e.g. unnatural,
embarrasses, sadly), and evidential meanings could indicate a level of
certainty (e.g. impossible, demonstrate, without doubt, will ) or doubt (e.g.
uncertain, assume, perhaps, maybe, might, should ).
In the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE, Biber
et al., 1999), Biber and colleagues extended and developed this framework to include more specific meanings, maintaining a distinction
between epistemic stance (evidentiality) and attitudinal stance (affect),
and adding a third category to indicate style of speaking (Biber, 2004,
2006a; Biber and Conrad, 2009). Epistemic stance includes meanings of
certainty, doubt, actuality, precision or limitation, as well as indicators
of the source or perspective of knowledge (e.g. according to, X claimed
that). Attitudinal stance includes attitudes, evaluations and personal
feelings or emotions. Stance markers indicating style of speaking offer
the speaker/writers comments on the communication (e.g. honestly, in
truth) (see Biber et al., 1999: Chapter 12 for further discussion).
Hylands extensive work in the area of stance is very much in line with
earlier research. Hyland (1996, 1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2000) focused specifically on the importance of hedging and boosting in academic writing,
with hedging referring to markers that limit commitment to a proposition (e.g. possible, might), and boosting referring to expressions indicating
a high degree of certainty towards a proposition (e.g. certainly, obviously).

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Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres

Building upon his earlier work in hedging and boosting, Hyland (2005)
put forth an overall paradigm of stance specifically related to academic
writing, which focused on writer-oriented features of interaction and refers
to the ways academics annotate their texts to comment on the possible
accuracy or credibility of a claim, the extent they want to commit themselves to it, or the attitude they want to convey to an entity, a proposition, or the reader (emphasis in original, p. 178). Thus, Hylands stance
framework encompasses evidentiality (identified in terms of hedging and
boosting and corresponding to varying levels of commitment towards
a proposition), affect or attitude markers, and presence (the degree to
which a writer places him/herself in a text through the use of first person
pronouns and possessive determiners).
Throughout discussions of stance, the term evaluation is often used
in explaining the meanings of stance markers, as they offer the writer/
speakers evaluation of a proposition or entity. Thus, it is no surprise
that a related body of research has been conducted under the umbrella
term of evaluation. Hunston and colleagues (Hunston and Thompson,
2000; Hunston and Sinclair, 2000; Hunston, 1994) have been particularly influential here, and Thompson and Hunston (2000: 226) outline
four parameters, or meanings, that evaluative language can convey:
1. Goodbad, or evaluations of positive and negative values or characteristics (value in Hunston, 1994);
2. Certainty, relating to the degree of certainty the speaker/writer has
with regard to information (status in Hunston, 1994);
3. Expectedness, referring to how obvious or expected the information
is to the hearer/reader;
4. Importance or relevance (relevance in Hunston, 1994).
The final approach to stance that we introduce here is that of appraisal
(Martin, 2000, 2003; Martin and White, 2005). Situated within systemic
functional linguistics, appraisal theory builds upon the traditional
concepts of affect and epistemic modality, and encompasses attitude,
engagement and graduation. In this framework, attitudinal stance meanings are further categorized as indicating affect (emotional responses),
judgement (moral evaluations) and appreciation (aesthetic evaluations).
Martin and White (2005: 36) roughly align engagement, on the other
hand, with epistemic stance meanings, and describe engagement as
concerned with the ways in which resources such as projective, modality, polarity, concession and various comment adverbials position the
speaker/writer with respect to the value position being advanced and

Bethany Gray and Douglas Biber

19

with respect to potential responses to that value position. Graduation,

then, deals with the gradability, or force and focus, of evaluations.
Despite a somewhat dizzying array of terminology, these five
approaches to stance all reinforce a basic distinction between meanings that (a) indicate a speaker/writers personal attitudes, emotions
and assessments, and (b) comment on the epistemic status of an entity
or, more commonly, a proposition containing a piece of information.
As shown below, the epistemic stance meanings are considerably more
important in academic research writing than the attitudinal meanings.

3 Linguistic realizations of stance in English: from

grammatical stance devices to value-laden words
As Hunstons (2004) title Counting the uncountable illustrates, identifying the linguistic realizations of stance in a text is not always an
easy task. Early research in the areas of evidentiality (and affect) often
focused on languages other than English, in which obligatory affixes or
particles are used to identify the source and/or certainty of information.
In contrast, English has no obligatory grammatical elements to express
stance meanings. However, there are numerous optional linguistic
features used in English for this purpose, including both grammatical
devices and simple word choice. In addition, stance-related meanings
can be expressed in speech through tone of voice, duration, loudness
and other paralinguistic features.
Most previous studies of stance in English have focused on grammatical stance devices: complement clause constructions, stance adverbials,
modal verbs and stance noun prepositional phrase constructions (see
Biber et al., 1999: 96686). These devices overtly express an attitude or
assessment with respect to some proposition. That is, a grammatical
stance device has two distinct components, one with the dedicated
function of expressing a personal stance, and the second presenting a
proposition that is framed by that stance.
Complement clause constructions (especially that-clauses) are probably the clearest case of a grammatical stance device: the controlling
element (a verb, adjective or noun) expresses the stance relative to the
proposition in the complement clause. For example:
Im very happy that were going to Sarahs.
Im sure that youve seen this too.
The fact that actual profits are variable adds to the instability of
investment.

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Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres

Stance adverbials also clearly express an overt attitude or assessment

with respect to the proposition contained in the matrix clause:
Obviously, it is not practical for accountants to measure business income
in this manner.
Unfortunately, it is presently impossible to predict which effect will
emerge in a particular situation.
In fact, this process of creation almost never just happens magically and
effortlessly but instead involves much trial and error.
Modal (and semi-modal) verbs are commonly used to express stance
meanings, but they are less explicitly a grammatical marker of stance,
because the modal verb is incorporated into the matrix clause. For
example:
Moreover, the story might reflect Chopins own views of her marriage,
despite her conscious statements about her loving husband.
She has to rent an apartment someplace downtown, right?
Finally, stance noun prepositional phrase constructions have two
distinct grammatical components, but it is not always clear that the
prepositional phrase actually expresses a proposition:
Government regulation is a fact of business existence.
and a free-market economy and trade with democracies like the US and
Japan is our only hope for security and prosperity.
The life expectancy test shows the importance of heredity, lifestyle, social
forces, and other social characteristics such as marital status.
At the other extreme of this parameter, stance can also be expressed
through simple word choice, as in the use of evaluative main verbs and
adjectives:
I love that one, thats darling.
Donald is an intelligent, likable, and hard-working college graduate.
Affective or evaluative word choice differs from grammatical stance marking in that it involves only a single proposition, rather than expressing a
stance relative to some other proposition. With such value-laden words,
the existence of a stance is inferred from the use of an evaluative lexical
item, usually an adjective, main verb or noun.

Bethany Gray and Douglas Biber

21

Many of the most common words in English are evaluative and used
for lexical expressions of stance (see Biber et al., 1999: 9689). For example, the most common adjectives in conversation include good, bad,
lovely and nice, used in both predicative and attributive functions:
oh thats bad.
you climb the mountain because its a nice hike.
A good place to start is the text.
Similarly, the most common verbs in conversation include like, love,
need and want, which express an emotion or attitude towards whatever
is referred to by the direct object:
Number three, we love stuff.
Such lexical expressions of stance are not restricted to conversation. For
example, several of the most common attributive adjectives in academic
prose are evaluative, including appropriate, good/best, important, practical,
useful (see Biber et al., 1999: 51115):
Scott states that the severity of a sanction leveled by others on an individual who has violated a norm represents one of the best indications of
the norms relative.
This group occupies important economic positions and some of its members have even been elected as foremen of their economic branch.
As the above examples illustrate, lexical expressions of stance depend
on the context and shared background for appropriate interpretation
as speaker/writer attitudes and evaluations. That is, there is nothing
in the grammatical structure of these expressions to show that they
mark stance: they are simple declarative structures that give the appearance of presenting stanceless facts. Thus, most attributive adjectives
are descriptive or classificatory, but not evaluative. Thus, compare the
adjectives in the following sentence to those illustrated above:
The amount of information concerning the ultrastructural correlates of
skeletal muscle denervation atrophy has grown considerably in recent
years, but only a slow progress has been made toward a substantial
understanding of the problem.
In sum, the simple use of value-laden words provides no overt grammatical devices to signal the presence of stance. Stance is embedded in

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Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres

these structures, depending on the addressees ability to recognize the

use of value-laden words.
However, there is also variation among grammatical stance devices
in the extent to which they explicitly attribute a stance directly to the
speaker/writer (see Biber et al., 1999: 9768). The most overt expressions
of stance are those with first person subjects, as in:
We know that people often play up their successes and play down their
failures.
And so we are not surprised also to find numbers of small bronzes and
images of gilt bronze, silver, and gold from the region.
Expressions which attribute stance evaluations to the addressee or a
third person are less explicit, as the stance markers do not necessarily
reflect the speaker/writers own evaluations; these structures are often
excluded from analyses of speaker/writer stance:
While many smaller European settler farmers worried that regionalism
might undermine their claims to land rights
You may mentally retrace the days events in an attempt to remember what
you were doing when you last had the car keys, because you know that
this most recent event is the most causally relevant to the current location
of the keys.
Other lexico-grammatical structures do not overtly attribute the stance
meaning to the speaker/writer; these devices include modal and semimodal verbs, stance adverbials and extraposed complement clauses:
Attitudes may be useful in diagnosing why consumers buy your Product,
or why they dont.
Clearly, the problem is not insurmountable, and simulation is being used
in business with increasing frequency.
It is possible that the data were too noisy to detect an underlying trend.
Complement clauses controlled by communication verbs can also be
considered as a type of implicit stance marking, where the choice of communication verb indicates the authors stance towards the information:
The authors suggest that Native American perspectives can provide elements for a contemporary ecological model of living

Bethany Gray and Douglas Biber

23

Some theorists go so far as to assert that schizophrenia is largely the creation of society
Most corpus-based studies of stance apply a lexico-grammatical methodological approach, analysing the sets of lexical items in specific grammatical structures that express particular stance meanings (certain
that-clause expressing epistemic stance, versus interesting that-clause
expressing attitudinal stance). Stance features of this type can be reliably identified and quantified through the use of automatic tools. The
frameworks presented in Biber (2006a, b; Biber and Finegan, 1989; Biber
et al., 1999), Hyland (1996, 1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2000) and Hunston
and Sinclair (2000) generally take this approach, and analyse a variety
of structural types of stance markers. Each stance marker is also typically
categorized along the cline of epistemic (expressing certainty, doubt/likelihood, and style of speaking) and attitudinal meanings.
Other research focuses more specifically on a single lexical item (e.g.
Diani, 2008 on really), a lexical class (e.g. Swales and Burke, 2003 on
evaluative adjectives), or a particular grammatical structure (e.g. Biber
and Finegan, 1988 on stance adverbials; Baratta, 2009 on passives;
Charles, 2006, 2007 and Hyland and Tse, 2005 on stance constructions
with that-clauses). A final, complementary approach involves a close
reading of a text to inductively identify instances of evaluative language
(e.g. Hunston 1993, 1994; Tucker, 2003). This type of research is more
often carried out within the evaluation and appraisal frameworks (e.g.
White, 2003; Dressen, 2003), and can include discussion of both grammatical and lexical stance expressions.

4 The expression of stance in academic writing

Academic research writing has traditionally been perceived to be objective, focused on conveying factual information. As Mauranen and
Bondi (2003a: 269) put it: Academic discourses carry the special weight
of older traditions and ideals of scientific objectivity, which supposedly
were to be reflected in academic writing as neutral, detachedly descriptive stances, as far removed from the human touch as possible.
In reaction to this traditional characterization, discourse analysts
over the last two decades have given considerable attention to the use
of evaluative language in academic discourse. Several researchers (e.g.
Hunston, 1993, 1994; Hyland, 2005; Charles, 2006) argue that academic
discourse seeks to persuade the reader to accept the authors viewpoint
or research findings, and thus should not be regarded as objective,

24

Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres

faceless and impersonal (Hyland, 2005: 173). Hunston (1994: 192) goes
so far as to claim that persuasion is the primary goal of experimental
research reports, and thus the authors primary purpose is to persuade
the academic community to accept the new knowledge claims and
to adjust its network of consensual knowledge in order to accommodate
those claims. Building on these new perspectives, numerous studies
have investigated the expression of stance and evaluation in written
academic discourse (e.g. Baratta, 2009; Charles, 2006, 2007; Dressen,
2003; Hunston, 1993, 1994; Hyland, 1996, 1998a, b, 1999, 2000;
Hyland and Tse, 2005; Mauranen and Bondi, 2003b; Silver, 2003; Swales
and Burke, 2003; Tucker, 2003).
However, comparative register research shows that the old stereotypes
about the stanceless nature of academic writing are to some extent
accurate. The studies surveyed in the last paragraph argue for the importance of stance in academic writing by restricting the scope of investigation to this single register. In contrast, studies that take a multi-register
perspective have shown repeatedly that overt stance expressions are
relatively rare in academic writing when compared to other spoken and
written registers. Thus, for example, 75 per cent of the written academic
texts analysed in Biber and Finegan (1989) were statistically categorized
as faceless (using a cluster analysis, based on the distribution of 12
lexico-grammatical stance devices). In contrast, most personal letters
were grouped in the emphatic expression of affect cluster, and most
public speeches were grouped in the oral controversial persuasion
stance category.
As noted above, multidimensional studies of register variation have
consistently identified one or more linguistic dimensions of variation that
are associated with stance functions. However, those dimensions show
that stance is especially prevalent in spoken registers and overtly interpersonal or persuasive written registers; in contrast, lexico-grammatical
stance devices are comparatively rare in informational written registers
like academic prose or official documents. These patterns have been
replicated in studies of general spoken and written English registers
(Biber, 1988) and university spoken and written registers (Biber, 2006b:
177212), as well as spoken and written registers in other languages like
Somali, Korean and Spanish (Biber, 1995: 24952; Biber et al., 2006).
Detailed corpus-based studies of lexico-grammatical stance features
also show these same patterns. For example, the Longman Grammar of
Spoken and Written English devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 12) to
the description of grammatical stance devices in four major registers.
Overall, stance expressions are much more common in conversation

Bethany Gray and Douglas Biber

25

than in writing, and they are more common in newspaper reportage

than in academic writing. This pattern holds for stance adverbials, complement clause constructions and modal verbs.
There is thus need for a balanced approach to the characterization of
stance in academic writing. On the one hand, by focusing exclusively
on this register, numerous studies have argued for the importance of
stance expressions in academic prose. On the other hand, by taking a
comparative register approach, other studies have shown that stance
is much more commonly expressed in other spoken and interpersonal
written registers, and that it is comparatively rare in academic writing.
There are, however, a few specialized grammatical stance devices
that are used especially in academic writing, including extraposed
complement clauses, stance noun+that-clause constructions, and stance
noun+prepositional phrase constructions. Biber (2006b: Chapter 5) documents patterns in stance use across university spoken and written registers in a large corpus (c.3 million words), showing that stance features
are generally rare in textbooks and research articles when compared to
their density of use in spoken university registers as well as other written registers like course syllabi and university catalogues.
More specifically, Biber (2006b: Chapter 5) demonstrated that with
respect to three major classes of stance features (modal and semi-modal
verbs, stance adverbs, and that- and to-complement clauses controlled
by stance verbs, nouns and adjectives), written academic registers (textbooks, course management texts and course packs) express stance to a
lesser degree than spoken academic registers across all three types of
stance markers (with the exception of modal verbs in course management texts). In all registers, modal verbs are the most frequent, followed
by stance complement clauses and then by stance adverbs.
Other findings from Biber (2006b: Chapter 5) include the following:
1. Textbooks and research articles are most reliant on possibility/
permission/ability modals in comparison to other types of modals,
typically with inanimate and/or abstract subjects:
This approach may also be unsatisfactory for two main reasons.
Conceptual teaching can result in enhanced problem-solving abilities
among learners.
2. Within the possible stance meanings, both spoken and written
registers use adverbs indicating a high degree of epistemic certainty

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Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres

(e.g. actually, certainly, in fact) to a greater extent than other stance

adverbs. While likelihood adverbs (showing a lesser degree of certainty and/or some amount of doubt, e.g. apparently, perhaps, possibly) are much more frequent than either style or attitudinal adverbs
in the three spoken registers, the written registers use likelihood and
style adverbs to similar extents and rely on these style adverbs to
qualify the source or extent of knowledge:
According to the resource-sharing model, temporary storage capacity is
contingent upon processing efficiency.
The smaller or reversed gender difference in longevity in the developing
nations is due primarily to maternal mortality
3. Written academic registers employ that- and to-complement clauses
headed by stance nouns, whereas these structures are largely absent
from spoken academic registers:
We cannot rule out the possibility that the more carnivorous taxa
(P. bipunctata, D. cephalotes, Polycentropodidae) do assimilate a small
amount of the algal material consumed.
Thirty-six-month-olds then successfully mapped the novel adjective to
the shared property, as evidenced by their significant tendency to select
property-matched over kind-matched test objects.
4. That-complement clauses headed by words conveying a degree of
certainty are generally the most common in all registers (with the
exception of study groups). The examples below illustrate common
stance words in these constructions in research articles and textbooks,
where writers assert the truth of the proposition that follows:
It is known that adolescents of this age rapidly move from one mood
state to another and display strong emotions for each mood swing.
We have shown that replication timing before X inactivation does not
correlate with skewing of X inactivation.
It is clear that the performance difference grows with the number of
processors used.
5. While spoken registers rely on clauses with likelihood meanings more
than communication meanings, the informational written registers
(textbooks, research articles) rely on likelihood and communication

Bethany Gray and Douglas Biber

27

meanings fairly equally. Complement clauses carrying a meaning of

likelihood reflect a lesser degree of commitment or certainty:
Thus, we hypothesized that a high K ratio elicits more cooperation
than a low K ratio (Experiment 1).
while complement clauses headed by communication verbs and
nouns indicate the manner in which a piece of information has been
communicated, as in:
Nevertheless, we propose that the most important spatial scales of variation in kelp holdfast assemblages on temperate reefs in north-eastern
New Zealand depend on which aspect of the assemblage is of interest.
This is not to imply that simply because a selection practice has disparate impact it is necessarily illegal.
6. The examples of stance complement clauses in this section also
illustrate a distinctive stance marker in academic writing: extraposed complement clauses (e.g. from the examples above: it is known
that, it appears that, it is clear that, it was obvious that, it is possible
that). Previous research has shown that these structures are more
common in academic writing than in other registers (Biber et al.,
1999: 674).
One question that has not to date been studied from an empirical
corpus-based perspective is the extent to which stance is expressed
lexically (through evaluative word choices) in academic writing. In
another research study (Biber and Gray, 2010), we track major historical
changes in the grammatical style of academic research writing over the
past two centuries, and argue that these changes have at the same time
resulted in an increasingly LESS explicit expression of meaning relations. Against that backdrop, it is reasonable to hypothesize that stance
in academic writing would often be expressed implicitly rather than
employing explicit grammatical devices. Hunston (1993: 70) also raises
this possibility, noting that the fact that research articles are essentially
persuasive in function and yet attract the label objective is an indication of the indirectness of evaluation involved.
For example, we can investigate the possibility of stance based on lexical items alone by considering all instances of the stance words included
in the stance paradigm used in Biber et al. (1999) and Biber (2006a, b).

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Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres

Whereas many existing corpus-based analyses only count these words

as stance markers when they occur in particular grammatical contexts
(as described in Section 3), the brief analysis here also considers them
when they occur outside of those specific grammatical frames.
The following passage comes from the discussion section of a research
article in education (McQuillan, 2005). Lexico-grammatical markers of
stance (which would have been identified in the corpus-based approach
taken in Biber, 2006a, b) are underlined. Any word (or related word
form) from the list of stance-conveying words is in bold if it occurs
outside of the grammatical context. Words which might be considered
to convey stance but which are not included in the stance framework
presented above are italicized.
Such trends highlight the need for ongoing, collaborative reflection so that people understand one anothers perspectives and have
opportunities to balance each others power if necessary, the early
chaos at Frontier being a perfect example. Finally, given its synergistic potential, student empowerment seems a promising strategy for
addressing the achievement gap. In too many US schools, educational
opportunity has been undermined by a constellation of factors
that are so interwoven that decades of reform have been unable to
address them. In my view, the most promising strategy for reversing
such long-standing failings of our educational system would be to
make student empowerment in all of its dimensions our top educational priority. At the least, making students genuine participants
in a more democratic educational process seems an appropriate and
estimable goal for one of the worlds oldest democracies. [RA]
Instances of explicit lexico-grammatical stance markers occur throughout the passage: opportunities to balance , have been unable to address
them, would be . In addition, two examples from this passage, the
need for and failings of, illustrate a pattern that has been found to be an
important stance marker prevalent in academic writing: stance noun +
prepositional phrases.
However, some of these individual words, we would argue, also clearly
indicate the writers evaluation of something. For example, the use of
attribute adjectives like promising and appropriate indicate evaluations,
perhaps in part because of their use after the verb seem. In these cases,
the attributive adjectives modify a noun that encapsulates the subject
of the sentence (a promising strategy refers to student empowerment, and
an appropriate goal refers to the proposition making students genuine

Bethany Gray and Douglas Biber

29

participants ), and the attributive adjectives offer evaluations of those

entities. Although the stance is grammatically implicit here, it can safely
be assumed that the writer is the one making these evaluations.
Other words that are a part of the stance framework discussed above
but which occur outside of lexico-grammatical frames are not as clearcut. That is, any stance they convey is even more implicit than the
examples discussed in the previous paragraph. For example, while the
nouns opportunity and failings convey positive and negative connotations (and humans generally consider failings to be a bad thing), it is less
clear as to whether or not these words convey the writers stance. Thus,
the stance here is much more implicit and dependent on the readers
interpretation of the writers word choice.
Still other words and phrases appear to indicate the writers stance,
but are not included on the list of stance words in the framework
presented above. For example, describing an example as perfect seems
similar to declaring something good or bad, adjectives which are on
the stance list. Phrases such as in my view and at the least also indicate
the writers stance. In these two examples, the stance is fairly explicit,
positioned as sentence adverbials that comment on the proposition
contained in the sentence.
This brief analysis illustrates that in addition to a lexico-grammatical
approach to stance in academic writing, it is possible for evaluative lexis
to convey a writer/speakers personal stance, yet this stance is generally
more implicitly attributed to the author.

Concluding remarks

While previous research has established that stance markers are used to
a higher extent in spoken registers when compared to written registers,
this research has also illustrated the prevalence of epistemic stance
meanings in all academic registers, regardless of mode. For example,
the results summarized from Biber (2006b) above show that stance
markers indicating the degree of commitment a writer has toward a
proposition or entity are most prevalent in nearly all cases. Although
the exact results have not been included here due to space constraints,
Biber (2006b) found that attitudinal markers are not used commonly in
any of the written academic registers, and are particularly not attested
in the written informational registers of textbooks and research articles.
Rather, the written informational registers rely most on markers indicating a high degree of commitment (certainty), followed by likelihood
and communication stance markers.

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Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres

However, the study also illustrates that written registers also exhibit
unique patterns of stance marking. Of the findings summarized for
written registers, written academic registers have also attested the use
of complement clauses headed by stance nouns as explicit markers of
stance, while these structures are largely absent from all spoken academic registers.
Furthermore, it should be clear, from the brief analysis of evaluative lexis, that more implicitly marked stance is also worthy of study
in academic writing, and future research would benefit greatly from
the development of analytical approaches that would allow for the
large-scale analysis of evaluative lexis in addition to the more explicitly
marked lexico-grammatical stance. While it is feasible to analyse previously established stance words in environments other than the lexicogrammatical patterns identified in this case study through large-scale,
automated processes (with the assumption that these words do indeed
carry stance meanings in these other contexts), it would be much more
difficult to identify additional words and phrases with a high degree
of reliability. That is, while we can confidently identify stance words
that occur in contexts (such as complement clauses) where the stance
expressed is grammatically related to a proposition, it is more difficult
to identify stance words that are not as overtly expressed grammatically.
Thus, approaches which allow for the reliable analysis of evaluative lexis
in large corpora need to be developed and evaluated in future research.
Finally, it should be noted that the analysis presented in this chapter has focused on broad patterns in the types and general meanings
expressed by stance markers in several academic registers, rather than
detailed analyses and interpretations of meanings and textual functions. This, along with comments on disciplinary differences in the use
of stance markers, we leave for the chapters that follow.

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