AUTHORIAL STANCE IN SOCIAL SCIENCES: A CROSS DISCIPLINARY AND CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY

Across different languages and disciplines, authors use a variety of linguistic strategies to implement their own 
voice into their scientific texts, in order to denote their agency overtly or covertly, to express their attitudes and evaluations, and to initiate a dialogue with their readership. All these notions fall under the concept of authorial stance. Based on a corpus of 73 research articles, written by native speakers in English, Serbian, and German, in two social sciences – linguistics and economics, this study investigates the quantitative and qualitative uses of authorial stance markers in these three linguistic communities and two disciplines. Quantitative results reveal distinct differences in the cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary use of these markers, as they are most frequent in German, followed by English and Serbian, and more frequent in linguistics than economics. A more detailed qualitative analysis reveals similar linguistic means of expressing stance among different languages and disciplines, such as personal and impersonal constructions, adjectives, and adverbs.