The Construction of Stance in Reporting Clauses: A Cross-disciplinary Study of Theses

Using a corpus-based approach, this paper investigates the construction of stance in finite reporting clauses with that-clause complementation. The data are drawn from two corpora of theses in contrasting disciplines: a social science—politics—and a natural science—materials science. A network for the analysis of reporting clauses is presented which sets out the major alternatives available to academic writers and enables stance to be linked systematically to grammatical and semantic patterns of use. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data leads to the identification of an important, but somewhat under-researched, function of reporting clauses in academic writing: their use to report the writer's own work. Drawing on the notions of averral and attribution, the paper shows how writers can emphasize or hide their responsibility for their own propositions and thereby construct a stance which differs according to the epistemology and ideology of the discipline concerned. These reporting clauses play a key role in the construction of major claims, with greater writer visibility seen in politics than materials. However, despite the superficial objectivity and impersonality of writing in the natural sciences, it is argued that skilled exploitation of the interplay between averral and attribution allows writers to construct a stance that is both clear and pervasive.