Voice and Stance as APPRAISAL: Persuading and Positioning in Research Writing across Intellectual Fields

Abstract

This chapter discusses the general concepts of stance and voice from the framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). It opens with a brief introduction to some aspects of SFL theory that inform their exploration, focusing on the subsystem of APPRAISAL. The second part of the chapter describes some applications of the framework in the domain of academic discourse, in particular in analyses of evaluative roles and positioning strategies in research writing within various intellectual fields. The studies represented here reflect a logogenetic approach to discourse analysis, in other words, a focus on tracking unfolding evaluative meanings in instances of texts, highlighting both their complexity and ways they interact. In this respect the approach differs significantly from corpusbased methods while at the same time offering a complementary standpoint. Although the illustrative accounts of the research are necessarily synoptic, they give some indication of the empirical potential of APPRAISAL theory, as well as an opportunity to stress some transdisciplinary explorations of how writers legitimate claims to knowledge.