ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology of Language
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1634848
This article is part of the Research TopicDiscourse, Conversation and Argumentation: Theoretical Perspectives and Innovative Empirical Studies, Volume IVView all 7 articles
"We find that…" Changing Patterns of Epistemic Positioning in Research Writing
Provisionally accepted
Yanfang Yang*
Xuan Guo- Xinxiang Institute of Engineering, Xinxiang, China
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Epistemic positioning refers to the writer's commitment to the truth of a proposition and assessment of its potential impact on readers. It is an essential rhetorical feature of research writing and has long been a central topic for applied linguists. However, little attention has been given to how writers make epistemic judgments that vary across the hard and soft disciplines over time. In this study, we draw on Hyland and Zou's (2021) taxonomies of hedges and boosters to explore how and to what extent the epistemic positioning features have changed across the disciplines over the past 60 years. Based on a corpus of 240 research articles from the four disciplines of education, history, mechanical engineering, and physics in three distinct periods of 1960, 1990, and 2020, we found epistemic positioning overall has fallen significantly across all four fields over time, showing that writers in all fields have displayed a preference for less use of epistemic positioning markers to seek an objective, data-based and scientific approach in research writing. Our finding has important implications for raising students' and novice academic writers' awareness of the changes in disciplinary knowledge associated with dynamic discourses and societies.
Keywords: Epistemic positioning, Hedges and boosters, diachronic change, Disciplinary variation, research writing History
Received: 25 May 2025; Accepted: 26 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yang and Guo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yanfang Yang, Xinxiang Institute of Engineering, Xinxiang, China
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