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Authors' rebuttal letters (ARLs) in response to journal reviewers critically affect whether a paper is accepted or rejected. However, the genre is traditionally "occluded" from the public view, and its linguistic or rhetorical features are seldom examined in the literature. Using Hyland's (2005) model, this study analyzes stance markers, i.e., expressions of the speaker's attitudes towards or commitment concerning a proposition, in 50 ARLs from five high-impact Nature Portfolio journals, which started publishing ARLs as supplements to manuscripts in 2020. The analysis shows that authors' stance deployment differs markedly between different sections of the ARL, i.e., Opening Statement, Point-by-Point Response, Additional Changes, and Closing Remarks. Attitude markers, boosters, and self-mentions are more frequent in ARLs than in research articles, serving to advocate the paper, highlight improvements, and show gratitude towards reviewers. Only 6 % ARLs fully accommodate all reviewer suggestions. When rejecting a criticism, authors rarely express total disagreement with reviewers, choosing instead to hedge the No Revision claims, use expressions of agreement and gratitude as buffers, and boost positive aspects of the paper. Findings of this study may be of interest to those who seek a better understanding of the language of ARLs, including ESP teachers and novice researchers. • 94 % authors' rebuttal letters (ARLs) contain No/Partial Revision responses. • Replies to criticisms contain fewer self-mentions than replies to positive comments. • Attitude markers showing gratitude and merits of paper are common throughout ARLs. • Hedging is most prevalent in No Revision responses, serving to soften disagreement. • Boosters reinforce self-praise, especially in No/Partial Revision responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic expressions of interest as emotive responses are not uncommon in academic discourse but have hardly attracted any research attention. This paper reports on a study designed to examine how the deployment of such expressions in academic writing is mediated by an academic author's disciplinary background and gender. Drawing on a semantic frame developed for interest markers found in a corpus of 640 research articles sampled from four disciplines, corpus-based quantitative analyses were conducted on the incidence of the various elements of the Interest frame. Text-based interviews were also conducted with 16 disciplinary informants to explore considerations behind their use of interest markers. The corpus analyses found that although discipline and gender did not reliably predict academic authors' overall use of interest markers, they were robust predictors of several frame elements. The analyses of the interview data revealed that the observed quantitative differences were related to disciplinary knowledge-making practices, knowledge/knower epistemological orientations prevailing in the disciplines, gender-preferential discursive practices and an author's relative status in academia. • We examined linguistic expressions of interest in 640 research articles. • These articles were authored by male and female academics from four disciplines. • We developed a semantic frame with four frame elements to study these expressions. • Disciplinary background influenced the use of Trigger, Explanation and Degree. • Gender differences were found in the use of Explanation, Degree and Experiencer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims to analyze how metadiscourse has been studied by examining scientific production during the last four decades. We used the bibliometric analysis. We selected papers on inclusion criteria: including Scopus articles published in English, Spanish, and other languages. For other databases, we considered publications in Spanish and some in Portuguese. The bibliometric analysis used the VOSviewer software. The results show the lines of research on metadiscourse, the approaches to its study, and the centers that lead them, as well as researchers and the various disciplines of their research. Additionally, we characterized niches as epistemic spaces for the study of metadiscourse: authorial commitment through interactional resources, self-mentions, and metadiscursive strategies. We found gaps between the scientific production published in Scopus, Scielo, and Google Scholar and between that published in English and Spanish concerning metadiscourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the knowledge that high school students participating in scientific initiation projects mobilize and employ in the writing of research articles, more specifically in terms of discursive abilities and their respective language operations. To do so, we selected ten research articles from two areas of knowledge - Agricultural Sciences and Linguistics, Letters and Arts -, produced by high school technical professional education students, in co-authorship with their advisors and with themes similar to those of the research projects. Such data are analyzed comparatively, through a qualitative-interpretative approach, from theoretical subsidies of Sociodiscursive Interactionism (ISD), notably with regard to the notions of language capacities and operations. The analyzes reveal that the producing agents of both areas mobilize types of discourses, textual sequences and other similar forms of planning, while adopting peculiar text plans, according to conventions that seem more related to each area of knowledge. This demonstrates that producers, when adopting a genre model, are able to adapt it to the discursive characteristics of the language action in which they are involved, which suggests an ongoing formative process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to contribute to the body of research on the formulaicity of academic written English by adopting a text-internal perspective on the use of lexical bundles across four main rhetorical sections (i.e. Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion) of research articles in public health. The corpus linguistic approach was adopted to explore a section-coded corpus of 200 research papers published in high impact journals with the aim of identifying salient shared and section-specific 4-word bundles, calculating their respective frequencies as well as classifying them structurally and functionally. The results show that the Method is the most formulaic section, containing the greatest number of bundles, including those most frequent and section-specific ones. The sections also differ in the extent to which they exploit the distinct structural and functional categories of shared bundles to fulfill their individual communicative needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of interactive metadiscourse in a representative corpus of digitalised, open access social science empirical research articles from the Economics and Law disciplines. Both distributional and functional analyses of interactive metadiscourse resources support a continuum of qualitative and quantitative empirical research analysis methods as necessary to regulate mechanisms for discipline- and culture-oriented knowledge practices in the genre. This study aims to provide a greater understanding of metadiscourse in this incrementally digitalised form of scholarly writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]