Epistemic Stance and Knowledge Construction in Nigerian Academic Discourse: A Cross-Disciplinary Corpus Study

This study presents a cross-disciplinary corpus study of epistemic stance expression and knowledge construction in Nigerian academic discourse, examining how Nigerian scholars in linguistics, economics, and law construct knowledge claims, hedge assertions, and position themselves relative to disciplinary knowledge communities in published research writing. The relationship between academic writing practices and disciplinary epistemologies is well-documented in global academic literacy scholarship, but systematic corpus evidence from Nigerian scholarly writing is scarce, limiting our understanding of Nigerian academic discourse norms and their divergence from Western publishing conventions. The study constructs a 1.5-million-token corpus of research articles from six accredited Nigerian journals across three disciplines, published between 2019 and 2024. The corpus is analysed using a multi-feature approach covering hedging devices, boosting strategies, attitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mention patterns, drawing on Hyland's metadiscourse framework and Biber's multi-dimensional analysis. Findings document significant disciplinary variation in epistemic stance patterns, with law scholarship showing the highest boosting-to-hedging ratios and economics scholarship the most frequent use of quantified evidentiality. Cross-disciplinary shared patterns include under-hedging relative to international journal benchmarks and a preference for writer-responsible rather than reader-responsible rhetorical styles. The study makes an original contribution to the emerging field of Nigerian academic discourse analysis and recommends stance instruction as a priority in Nigerian postgraduate writing development programmes. Keywords: epistemic stance, academic discourse, corpus linguistics, knowledge construction, Nigerian scholarship.