Abstract:
This study investigates the textual colligation of stance phrases at the levels of sentence, paragraph and text in empirical research articles from agriculture and economics. We extracted the textual positions of stance phrases with the software Wordskew (Barlow, 2016) in two purpose-built corpora of around three million tokens. The results show that stance phrases display similar distribution patterns in the two disciplinary corpora; however, we found significant differences with respect to the frequency of stance phrases in particular textual positions in each corpus. The findings consolidate Hoey’s (2005) premise that certain expressions are primed to occur in particular textual positions. We contend that the textual positions of stance phrases may be a result of the routinised discourse function that they serve, and that the appropriate timing of stance-taking is of particular communicative importance.
