An investigation of stance in French native novice writing: Bringing the Anglo-Saxon tradition into the French-speaking research sphere

Jadoulle, Pauline [UCL]

Stance, or the linguistic ways writers express their (1) assessment and commitment and (2) attitudes and value judgments towards the information presented, is an area of difficulty for native and non-native novice writers of English academic writing. Novices have, for instance, been found to take on a more assertive tone and to adopt a more personal style than experts (e.g. Aull & Lancaster 2014, Larsson 2019). Research on French native novices appears to reveal similar findings (e.g. Rinck & Pouvreau 2010), but the results of studies from the Anglo-Saxon and the French traditions are difficult to compare. Stance is in fact approached very differently in the two traditions, be it in terms of descriptions and categorizations of stance, or in terms of methodologies adopted. The most striking difference might be the fact that linguists from the French tradition typically conduct qualitative analyses of a limited number of texts (e.g. Donahue 2002, Delcambre & Laborde-Milaa 2002) while linguists from the Anglo-Saxon tradition tend to favor corpus-based quantitative analyses of lexico-grammatical stance features (e.g. Aull 2015, Hyland 2012). This paper brings the Anglo-Saxon tradition into the French-speaking research sphere by applying typical Anglo-Saxon stance frameworks and methodologies to corpora of French academic writing. It aims to revisit findings from the French tradition, and to understand whether the stance features typically highlighted in English novice writing also characterize French novice writing. The analyses are conducted by comparing a corpus of native novice French academic writing (i.e. the French Academic wRiting corpus, or FAR) with a corpus of French expert academic writing (i.e. the KIAP-FR-LING). The FAR is comprised of 70 academic papers written by French-speaking students in the framework of their linguistics courses at UCLouvain (Belgium), and the KIAP-FR-LING holds 50 research articles written in French and in the field of linguistics. The focus is placed on epistemic and attitudinal adverbials and complement clauses controlled by adjectives, nouns, and verbs. Stance markers are extracted by combining a corpus-driven approach and a manual selection of those markers (e.g. hypothèse, peut-être and intéressant), which are then disambiguated in context. The data is then analyzed in terms of marker frequencies, lexical preferences, and lexical diversity. Adopting such a systematic corpus-based approach to stance in the study of novice writing arguably allowed us to empirically (in)validate findings made on the basis of a restricted number of texts, in the same way as corpus-based studies on personal pronouns have allowed researchers to gain empirical insights into the use of those pronouns in French academic writing (e.g. Hartwell & Jacques 2014, Fløttum & Vold 2010). On the one hand, it was found that French novices do not necessarily take on a more assertive tone than French experts. In fact, it is quite the opposite: they are more tentative than their expert counterparts as they tend to overuse hedges like sembler and peut-être. On the other hand, and in a similar way as English novices, French novices tend to adopt a more personal tone than experts, with a heavy reliance on items like difficulté and intéressant. This result is in line with the description made by researchers from the French tradition, of French novice writing as being more attitude-laden than French expert writing. References Aull, L. (2015). First-Year University Writing: A Corpus-Based Study with Implications for Pedagogy. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgarve Macmillan. Aull, L. & Lancaster, Z. (2014). Linguistic markers of stance in early and advanced academic writing: A corpus-based comparison. Written Communication, 31(2), 151-183. Delcambre, I. & Laborde-Milaa, I. (2002). Diversité des modes d’investissement du scripteur dans l’introduction du mémoire professionnel. Enjeux, 53, 11-22. Donahue, C. (2002). Effets de l’écrit sur la construction du Sujet textuel à l’université. Spirale, 29, 75-108. Fløttum, K. & Vold, E. (2010). L’éthos auto-attribué d’auteurs-doctorants dans le discours scientifique. Lidil, 41, 41-58. Hartwell, L.M. & Jacques, M.-P. (2014). Authorial presence in French and English: “Pronoun + Verb” patterns in biology and medicine research articles. Discours, 15. Hyland, K. (2012). Undergraduate understandings: Stance and voice in final year reports. In K. Hyland & C. Sancho-Guinda (eds.), Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York: Palgarve Macmillan, 134-150. Larsson, T. (2019). Grammatical stance marking across registers: Revisiting the formal-informal dichotomy. Register Studies, 1(2), 243-268. Rinck, F. & Pouvreau, L. (2010). La mise en scène de soi dans un écrit d’initiation à la recherche en didactique du français. SCRIPTA, 13(24), 157-172.