Evaluative Meanings and Disciplinary Values - eTheses Repository ...

likely to use interpersonal metadiscourse features such as hedging to persuade readers to
accept their arguments, while researchers in microbiology and astrophysics are likely to use
overt intertextuality to minimize their own authorial presence in texts
(1998, 2000) lead to the conclusion that hedges occur very frequently in soft disciplines, but
are less used in hard disciplines because subjective ideas are the primary feature of the former
while objective and structural features dominate in the latter. In other words, the ability to
study large corpora enables the analyst to demonstrate empirically Becher and
(2001) claim that the construction of knowledge in social science is overtly personal, whereas
in the natural sciences it is presented as impersonal and objective.
As Charles (2004) has pointed out, comparative studies are important for revealing
linguistic characteristics of different disciplines. However, one of the challenges that the new
generation of corpus-based researchers face is the choice of which discipline to compare. As
should be clear from the above, most studies have tended to compare disciplines from very
different epistemological traditions (e.g. history and biology). However, it could be objected
that we can easily predict the existence of differences between language used in soft and hard
disciplines even before undertaking in-depth research. Differences within the same
epistemological field (i.e. hard or soft) are harder to predict, and it is perhaps for this reason
that such research is quite rare. Groom (2005) examined history and literary criticism, two
soft disciplines, and found that although there were certain continuities between the two fields,
each discipline nevertheless has its own unique phraseological profile. What this study shows
is that the in-depth study of epistemologically similar disciplines is valuable not only in that it
contributes to our understanding of disciplinary differences, but also because it presents a
more stringent test for the disciplinary differences.
More specifically, several researchers (e.g. Hyland, 2000; Becher & Trowler, 2001;
Atkinson, 2004) have considered disciplinary communities as sub-cultures with distinct
internal norms and practices which are shared and constructed by their members. Such
disciplinary conventions seem to constrain writing conventions (i.e. the writers choice of
language in the discourse) (e.g. Hyland, 1998, 2002a; Breivega, Dahl & Fløtum, 2003).
Following this assumption, one of my interests in the current study is to analyse pattern
variation and behaviour between distinct disciplines. In particular, the current study attempts
to extend the approach used in Grooms study of looking at two soft disciplines. This is
largely because the construction of knowledge in the natural sciences (i.e. hard disciplines) is
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