Stance nouns in COVID-19 related blog posts: A contrastive analysis of blog posts published in The Conversation in Spain and the UK

Research dissemination through academic blogs creates opportunities for writers to reach wider audiences. With COVID-19, public dissemination of research impacts daily practices, and national and international policies, and in countries like the UK and Spain, The Conversation publishes accessible COVID-19 themed research. Such academic blogs are important to global academy, yet the role of authorial stance therein is notably under-investigated. This paper presents a corpus-based contrastive analysis of 'stance nouns + that/de que' in a comparable corpus of English and Spanish COVID-19 themed academic blogs, from The Conversation. The analysis identifies similarities and differences across languages that reflect how COVID-19 is framed in each language. For example, Spanish academics use Possibility and Factualness nouns when self-sourcing their stances with expanding strategies, while English academics use Argument and Idea nouns with external-sources in contracting strategies. Overall, this paper adds to current linguistic knowledge on academic blogs and scientific communication surrounding COVID-19.