A Corpus-based Study on Evaluation Adjectives in Academic English

Abstract

As proposed by Biber et al. (1999: 966, 972), stance requires the communication of assessments and value judgments concerning the described situation by appeal to evidence (evidentiality), assessment of the degree of likelihood concerning the described situation (epistemic modality), and the arguments regarding the necessity or desirability of the situation obtaining (deontic modality). The present study investigates authorial stance in doctoral dissertations of native and non-native academic authors of English. It is designed to analyze evaluation adjectives in doctoral dissertations produced in the field of English Language Teaching, Applied Linguistics, English Language and Literature and Modern Languages between 2005 and 2012. Throughout the study, a total number of fifty-one evaluation adjectives were examined across three sets of corpora including dissertations written by native speaking academic authors of English (NAEs), Turkish-speaking academic authors of English (TAEs) and Spanish-speaking academic authors of English (SAEs). The items in question were identified through WS Tools (Scott, 2012) over three corpora, which were subsequently compared with regard to their frequency using a log likelihood test. Findings of the study have revealed that these adjectives were significantly underused by TAEs and SAEs against NAEs. The study offers a couple of possible reasons for this particular consequence and a few instructional suggestions for academic writing in a second language.