Stance devices in tourism-related research articles: A corpus-based study

Surprisingly, as noted earlier, a description of the rhetorical organization of tourism RAs has not been undertaken despite the educational benefits this may bring for tourism students and non-linguistic professionals. Earlier literature (e.g., Lin and Evans 2012) comments on the apparent fuzziness of this RA structure, to the extent that it is difficult to identify major structural sequences. Based on my inspection of a corpus of RAs in the field, I argue in this volume that genre stages in these RAs present an identifiable rhetorical pattern, which may fit the traditional introduction, method, results, and discussion (IMRD) model to some extent.

As I shall explain later in this volume, the RA in the field of tourism shows some register specificities that may render methodological passages more narrative than expositive. Narration seems to play a prominent role, both to depict the research setting and to offer justificatory grounding. In this sense, language comes to evince perspectives in the elaboration and disambiguation of meaning, which, I hypothesize, represent different research momentums. These impetuses unfold linguistically differently in each RA stage to build both content and attitudinal meaning, thus reflecting the authors’ stance.

A revision of the literature on stance in academic writing unveils some language devices with an indexical function. Among these studies, Chen (2009), Wang and Tu (2014), Ferdinandus (2016), and Okuyama (2020) focus on tense in different academic genres to show the way in which authors deploy this grammatical device to convey some degree of involvement in the description of the research conducted. Somehow connected to tense, the use of the passive voice in academic writing has been a matter of discussion, as the work of Ruelas Inzunza (2020) evinces. This device is frequently considered as an impersonalizing strategy to avoid accountability (cf. Rundblad 2007).

Conditionals, as pointed out in Cacchiani (2018), serve the purpose of revealing authors’ own logical thinking in the development and elaboration of meaning in a RA, as I shall show below. This argues for the evaluative dimension of these structures in the creation of new information. Likewise, that-complement clauses have been found to clearly show authors’ evaluation of the event or phenomenon being described, as noted in Hyland and Tse (2005a, 2005b), Godnič Vičič (2015), and Kozáčiková (2021).

That said, my main objective in this volume is to evaluate the presence and function of these perspectivizing language devices in a compilation of RAs in the register of tourism. Thus, this study follows a research method based on corpus linguistics. As complex searches must be undertaken, corpus query language (CQL) is used to tailor the corpus inquiry to my needs. For this reason, the corpus is conveniently tagged for parts of speech (POS). Corpus tools will allow for the retrieval of n-gram samples as well as collocates and concordances. Statistical significance will be also assessed with the data obtained from the interrogation of the corpus. Other research objectives that need to be accomplished in order to fulfil my primary one concern the identification and description of the rhetorical organization of the RAs. This is especially relevant for detecting the statistical significance of these devices per genre stage.

This study aims, therefore, to answer the research questions below: