Use of that-clauses in research articles: Variation across paradigms

Abstract That-clauses allow academic writers to make arguments and persuade readers to accept them. The use of that-clauses has been widely studied in terms of disciplinary variation in research writing. One problem with these studies investigating disciplinary variation is that they have not considered the potential variation in qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research paradigms within disciplines, as the potential influence of research paradigm will make it unable to determine whether the observed variation is best explained in terms of disciplinary conventions or of paradigmatic influence. This study investigates how published academic writers mark authorial stance via that-clauses in qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods nursing research articles (RAs). The results show paradigmatic variation in this pattern across the three paradigms in five RA sections (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusion). The existence of paradigmatic variation calls into question how reliable the results are in an unbalanced corpus where research paradigms are not differentiated. Keywords: that-clauses, academic writing, variation, research articles, research paradigms.