The language of evaluation and stance in crowdfunding project proposals

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Today, digital crowdfunding platforms allow researchers to increasingly use digital resources to reach and engage diversified audiences, making scientific content accessible to everyone. This paper explores how evaluation in text contributes information relevant to understanding how scientists use language to express their expert opinions of scientific research and their attitudes about the value of their projects. Starting from the compilation and analysis of a 50-science project corpus from Experiment.com, evaluative stance expressions in this work were classified according to Biber’s (2004) taxonomy into the following stance categories: verbs, adverbs, adjectives and nouns. Subsequently, genre analysis was applied to identify the discourse functions of these evaluative words in each rhetorical section of the project proposals. Results show that the analysed crowdfunding proposals are rich in stance verbs (52.65%) and, to a lesser extent, stance adjectives (23.52%), serving to express values of effort, improvement and diligence in the proposed projects, as well as judgement regarding experiments and ‘Lab Notes’ updates, respectively. This can be useful for both theoretical advancement and pedagogical purposes, that is, to apply scientists’ findings to digital communication teaching and learning.