Publishers and Authorial Voice in Applied Linguistics Research Articles: A Corpus-Based Study

Although various studies have been done on authorial voice, none has focused on the possible differences among the articles published by different publishers. To shed light on this issue, this article sought to find the different levels of the use of stance-driven authorial voice in applied linguistics articles published by three international publishers. To this end, 248 applied linguistics articles published from 2000 to 2020 by three intentional publishers were selected through stratified random sampling. After trimming them, a corpus of 1.5 million words was achieved. Then, the normalized frequencies of Hyland's proposed list of stance markers were extracted using the LancsBox corpus analysis toolbox. The obtained data were analysed using the Kruskal-Wallis test in SPSS 26. The results showed that there are significant differences in the use of overall stance markers, attitude markers, and self-mention markers in the articles published by different publishers, while the results were not significant for hedges and boosters. Our findings can inform the research article writers, academic writing course instructors, and the publishing staff.