Abstracts The increasing prevalence of tables and figures in research articles testifies to the significance of visuals in academic genres. As the verbal description of visual elements, graph accounts fully embody the intersemiotic relationship in multimodal academic discourse. While there are detailed technical prescriptions for the presentation of such nonverbal materials as figures and tables in most of academic writing textbooks, few studies address graph accounts in the context of modality shift, especially from a diachronic perspective. This study examined how graph accounts in applied linguistics articles have changed in terms of stance and engagement over the past four decades. Based on the corpus analysis of stance and engagement in three different periods, we found that graph accounts in applied linguistics have become progressively more interactive over time, evidenced by a significant increase in overall stance markers, particularly bare assertions. Remarkable distinctions were observed in the use of stance markers between data-oriented and non–data-oriented graph accounts, with the latter showing a greater propensity for self-mentions. Among the three functions we identified in graph accounts, location and highlight showed a remarkable growth, whereas discussion exhibited a fluctuating downward trend. Behind these changes, it is suggested that the changing academic writing conventions and disciplinary paradigms as well as attributes of graph accounts may have encouraged applied linguists to strategically modify their use of stance and engagement in graph accounts.
Han et al. (Thu,) studied this question.