Analysing stance in American and Spanish business management RAs : the case sentence-initial "retrospective labels"

Abstract

When writing research articles (RAs), scholars can use certain lexico-grammatical traits that enable them to encode their attitudes, judgments and opinions, thus functioning as markers of stance. It is believed that sentenceinitial nouns preceded by a deictic -'retrospective labels' in Francis's terminology (1986, 1994)- can be considered one of those traits. The aim here is to explore whether there are any language-driven differences in the use of 'retrospective labels' as markers of stance within a particular disciplinary discourse, namely, Business Management. 'Retrospective labels' were analysed in a corpus of 12 Ras on the above-mentioned discipline, 6 in American English and 6 in Spanish. The focus is placed on the contrastive analysis of the frequency of use of these 'retrospective labels', the type of head nouns and modifiers which most frequently form part of them and the extent to which these 'retrospective labels' convey attitudinal meaning. As a general implication, it is believed that the differences drawn from analyses of this type should be borne in mind by Spanish Business Management scholars when writing their RAs in English.