Author Count, Author Gender, and Authorial Stance: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis

Numerous studies have corroborated the importance of metadiscourse in academic writing. As one of the main components of metadiscourse, stance has received fairly extensive attention recently. One of the questions in this regard (with conflicting results) has been the relationship between author gender and the use of stance markers. Moreover, the relationship between author count and stance markers in research articles has been extremely under-researched. Therefore, this study set out to investigate the relationship of author gender and author count with stance markers in the applied linguistics research articles. To this end, a corpus of 416 articles (with a total word count of over 2.6 million words) was used for the author count question. Of this large corpus, 199 articles were used for the gender-stance investigation. The normalized frequencies of stance markers were extracted using LancsBox corpus analysis software. Then, the obtained data was analyzed using Mann-Whitney test to shed light on the relationship of author gender and author count with authorial stance. Mixed results were obtained for the relationship of author count and authorial stance components (including hedges, boosters, self-mention markers, and attitude markers), while no significant result was obtained for the relationship between gender and stance.