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Predicting the variation in stance-taking: the use of evaluative-that in English as a lingua franca academic writing

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Abstract

This corpus-based study explores distinctive epistemic stance-taking features of ELF research writing in terms of evaluative that-clauses use. Data from two sets of corpora were compared. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted to reveal the variation concerning four dimensions of evaluative-that pattern and their rhetorical effects on communication. The findings demonstrate that ELF writers deploy an extended range of evaluative-that controlling verbal predicates and make significantly higher use of stance nouns to embellish their research. The results also indicate that ELF writers exhibit greater writer visibility than native cohorts to present their identities as problem solvers and creative interpreters. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that ELF writers tend to signal a stronger sense of epistemic certainty to legitimize research outcomes, acknowledge the truth of previous knowledge claims, and promote the effectiveness of research methods. The present study supplements the previous ELF research from an epistemic stance-taking perspective. The findings of this study have pedagogical implications for ESP/EAP teaching and learning in both the ELF context and for scholarly publication purposes.

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Notes

  1. All examples presented in this paper were taken from both SciELF and COCA corpus. The examples were coded distinctively with different headings such as SciELF_ and COCA_ to indicate different data sources. Meanwhile, we mark science and social sciences/humanities samples as Sci and SSH, respectively, followed by the specific text number in a given corpus.

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Acknowledgements

This study is part of the research output of the National Social Sciences research project entitled “A Genre-based Study of the Dynamic Intertextual and Interdiscursive System in Chinese and Foreign Professional Discourse” (NO. 17BYY033). We’d like to thank Anna Mauranen for providing SciELF corpus for this research. We also thank the anonymous reviewers and editors for their valuable comments for the refinement of this draft.

Funding

National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science,NO. 17BYY033,Liming Deng.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Research Institute of Foreign Languages, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Liming Deng & Meiling Wang

  2. The School of Humanities, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia

    Xiaoping Gao

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  1. Liming Deng
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  2. Meiling Wang
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Correspondence to Meiling Wang.

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Appendices

Appendix

Appendix A Verbs/nouns/ adjectives that control evaluative that-clauses in SciELF corpus

Types of controlling words

Verbs (122)

Communication verbs (47)

Mental verbs (41)

show, suggest, indicate, note, demonstrate, reveal, advocate, affirm, articulate, attest, certify, check, clarify, confirm, describe, document, emerge, ensure, establish, evidence, follow, formulate, guarantee, highlight, identify, illustrate, implicate, obtain, posit, postulate, present, prove, provide, provoke, reaffirm, recommend, reinforce, reiterate, require, signify, specify, stipulate, submit, underline, underscore, verify, write

assume, mean, find, believe, conclude, think, see, observe, consider, accept, anticipate, ascertain, calculate, conceive, decide, deduce, determine, discover, doubt, estimate, expect, extrapolate, feel, forget, hold, hypothesize, imagine, infer, judge, know, learn, maintain, notice, perceive, predict, presuppose, realize, recognize, remember, speculate, suppose, understand

Speech act verbs (31)

argue, say, imply, claim, state, acknowledge, add, admit, agree, announce, answer, assert, complain, contend, declare, demand, deny, emphasize, explain, express, grant, hint, insist, mention, point out, propose, remark, remind, report, stress, urge, warn

Verbs of probability (2)

appear, seem

Nouns (84)

Adjectives (13)

approach, asset, assumption, argument, assertion, awareness, belief, case, cause, chance, characteristic, claim, concept, conception, coincidence, conclusion, condition, comment, consequence, consensus, contention, counter-argument, corollary, development, difference, divergence, effect, element, evidence, expectation, explanation, extent, fact, feature, finding, ground, hypothesis, idea, indication, inference, information, interpretation, intuition, insight, issue, likelihood, mechanism, message, notion, observation, opinion, perception, perspective, point, possibility, position, postulate, prediction, premise, presumption, principle, problem, probability, proposal, proposition, proof, quality, reason, report, result, restriction, requisite, sense, situation, statement, story, suggestion, suspicion, tendency, thesis, truth, view, viewpoint, way

apparent, aware, clear, doubtful, evident, likely, obvious, plausible, possible, probable, sure, true, unlikely

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Deng, L., Wang, M. & Gao, X. Predicting the variation in stance-taking: the use of evaluative-that in English as a lingua franca academic writing. Scientometrics 128, 3283–3311 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04700-x

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