Diachronic corpus analysis of stance markers in research articles: The field of applied linguistics

Despite the continuously growing body of research on metadiscourse markers in different genres and through various perspectives for over 20 years, very little is known of how these features have evolved over time in response to the historically developing practices of academic communities. Motivated by such an ambition, the current research drew on a corpus of 4.3 million words taken from three leading journals of applied linguistics in order to trace the diachronic evolution of stance markers of research articles from 1996 to 2016. Hyland's model of metadiscourse was adopted for the analysis of the selected corpus. The data were explored using concordance software AntConc. Moreover, a Chi-Square statistical measure was run to determine statistical significances. The analysis revealed a significant decline in the overall frequency of stance markers, with devices in all categories, except self-mention which increased dramatically over the past 20 years. The paper has been concluded by offering some suggestions for teaching academic writing.