Authorial stance and identity building in weblogs by law scholars and scientists

This chapter examines comparatively how law and science bloggers construct their identity while communicating with their disciplinary community. Drawing on Hyland’s (Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies, 7(2), 173–192, 2005a; Metadiscourse: Exploring interaction in writing. Bloomsbury (Continuum), 2005b) analysis of stance in academic genres, a quantitative and qualitative study is presented based on a small comparable corpus of blog posts written by law scholars and scientists. The study combines corpus methodology with a discourse analytic approach and identifies linguistic patterns of self-mention and authorial stance. The analysis shows that law blogs focus on the technical contents (revealed by the lower frequency of I/me in law compared to science), while science blogs mark subjective assessment explicitly and through a variety of attitudinal verbs. These results point to a more personal style of blogs revolving around the scientist-blogger and his audience versus a more impersonal style of law blogs where the focus is the ideational content of the court decision, the reasoning, and legal argumentation.