A Corpus-Based Study on Epistemic Adjectives in Academic English

Reyhan Ağçam^1,

¹School of Foreign Languages, Kahramanmaraş Sütçü İmam University, Kahramanmaraş, Turkey

Cite this paper

Reyhan Ağçam. A Corpus-Based Study on Epistemic Adjectives in Academic English. American Journal of Educational Research. 2014; 2(12):1230-1236. doi: 10.12691/EDUCATION-2-12-16

Abstract

‘Stance is the way academics annotate their texts to comment on the possible accuracy or creditability of a claim, the extent they want to commit themselves to it, or the attitude they want to convey to an entity, a proposition or the reader’ (Hyland, 2005). Recent studies have revealed that researchers, particularly those who study soft sciences, tend to adopt a certain stance while reporting on their research even though they are supposed to use an objective voice in their academic writing. The present study aims to investigate epistemic adjectives used in conveying author stance in Academic English through a corpus-based approach. It reports the results of the Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger, 1996) administered to a total number of 136 doctoral dissertations written by native and non-native academic authors of English. Frequencies of the epistemic adjectives were separately calculated for each corpus and a log-likelihood test was utilized to see whether native and non-native academic authors of English significantly differ with regard to these items. Findings of the study have shown that certainty adjectives were mostly used by non-native academic authors of English whilst likelihood adjectives were mostly employed by native academic authors of English, which leads us to the conclusion that the non-native groups are inclined to use cautious expressions less frequently than the native groups in their academic writing. The study concludes with possible reasons for this particular result, implications of the results to academic writing and a few suggestions for further research.

Keywords

academic writing, contrastive interlanguage analysis, epistemic adjective, stance

Copyright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

References

[1]	Ädel, A. (2010). Using corpora to teach academic writing: Challenges for the direct approach. In M. C. Compoy-Cubillo, B. Belles-Fortuno& M. L. Gea-Valor (Eds.), Corpus based approach to English language teaching (pp. 39-54).
[2]	Baker, P., Hardie, A., &McEnery, T. (2006). A glossary of corpus linguistics. Edinburg: Edinburg.
[3]	Biber, D. &Finegan, E. (1989). Styles of stance in English: Lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect. Text, 9, 93-124.
[4]	Biber, D. (2006). University language: A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
[5]	Conrad, S. &Biber, D. (2000). Adverbial making of stance in speech and writing. In S. Hunston and G. Tompson (Eds.), Evaluation in Text, 56-73. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[6]	Gabrielatos, C. & McEnery (2005). Epistemic modality in MA dissertations. In Fuertes Olivera, P.A. (Ed.),Lengua y Sociedad: Investigacion e srecientes en lingüísticaaplicada (pp. 311-331). Lingüística y Filología, 61. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid.
[7]	Gosden, H. (1990). Discourse functions of subject in scientific research articles. Applied Linguistics, 14(1), 56-75.
[8]	Granger, S. (1996). From CA to CIA and back: An integrated approach to computerized bilingual and learner corpora. In K. Aijmer, B. Altenberg, & M. Johansson (Eds.), Languages in contrast. Lund: Lund University Press, 37-51.
[9]	Hyland, K. (2005). Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies, 7(2), 173-192.
[10]	Kafes, H. (2009). Authorial stance in academic English: Native and non-native academic speaker writers’ use of stance devices (modal verbs) in research articles. PhD Thesis, Anadolu University.
[11]	Kanté, I. (2010). Head nouns as modal stance markers –academic texts vs. legal texts. Enonciation et rhetorique dansl’ecrit scientifique, Lidil 41, 121-135.
[12]	MacIntyre, R. (2010). How do they stand? Research into the representation of stance in academic writing and its implications for pedagogy. Sophia University Faculty of Liberal Arts, 19-32.
[13]	Oxford advanced learner’s dictionary (2000). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[14]	Salager-Meyer, F. (1997). I Think that Perhaps You Should: A Study of Hedges in Written Scientific Discourse. In Miller, T. (Ed.), Functional Approaches to Written Text: Classroom Applications. English Language Programs: United States Information Agency, 105-118.
[15]	Scott, M. (2012). WordSmith Tools version 6, Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.
[16]	Skelton, J. (1988). Comments in academic articles. In P. Grunwell (Ed.), Applied Linguistics in Society: British Studies in Applied Linguistics 3. 98-108. London: Centre for International Language.
[17]	Stubbs, M. (1986). A matter of prolonged field work: notes toward a model grammar of English. Applied Linguistics, 7(1), 1-25.
[18]	Ventola, E. & Maureanen, A. (1990). Research and Writing in English. Helsinki: Yliopistopaino.