Authors : Yanfang Yang, Xuan Guo
Introduction: Epistemic positioning refers to the writer’s commitment to the truth of a proposition and assessment of its potential impact on readers. Despite its importance, little attention has been paid to how writers make epistemic judgments across disciplines over time.
Methods: Drawing on Hyland and Zou’s taxonomies of hedges and boosters, we analyzed 240 research articles from education, history, mechanical engineering, and physics, covering three periods (1960, 1990, and 2020).
Results: Our findings show that epistemic positioning has significantly decreased across all four disciplines over time, with writers increasingly preferring less use of epistemic markers in pursuit of an objective, data-based, and scientific style.
Discussion: These results suggest a disciplinary shift in research writing practices and have important implications for raising students’ and novice academic writers’ awareness of evolving knowledge discourses shaped by changing societies.
URL : “We find that…” changing patterns of epistemic positioning in research writing
