Stance features in legal blogging

The paper explores how law bloggers use stance resources to position themselves within the legal community. Drawing on Hyland’s (2005a, 2005b) analysis of stance, a quantitative and qualitative analysis is presented based on a small corpus of blog posts written by law scholars commenting on legal cases relating to US and UK court decisions. The study combines corpus methodology with a discourse analytic approach and identifies stance features marking bloggers’ presence in relation to their arguments and audience. The analysis shows that law bloggers prefer to downplay their commitment to the positions advanced in the posts and convey their authorial stance through boosters and attitude markers, rather than self-mention. This aspect appears in contrast to the distinctive feature generally associated with blogs, i.e. individualistic self-expression. These findings may contribute to a better understanding of the legal practices in web-mediated communication.