Abstract
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.
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This research was supported by the Italian Ministry of Research, grant number PRIN 2015 2015TJ8ZAS.
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Diani, G., Freddi, M. (2023). Authorial Stance and Identity Building in Weblogs by Law Scholars and Scientists. In: Plo-Alastrué, R., Corona, I. (eds) Digital Scientific Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38207-9_5
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