Reviewer stance in academic review articles: a cross-disciplinary comparison

This paper presents the preliminary results of a cross-disciplinary comparison of the expression of stance in the academic book review article genre. The study compares features of stance in two small corpora of English book review articles from academic journals in the fields of linguistics and economics. Special attention is paid to the grammar category of stance adverbials. A quantitative analysis of the corpus data reveals significant and systematic distributional trends in the use of adverbials of epistemic stance (e.g. perhaps, of course) across the disciplines, and a qualitative analysis confirms that these trends are motivated by genre-specific purposes and discipline-specific practices, respectively.