Content analysis of dogmatism compared with corpus analysis of epistemic stance in student essays

Abstract

This paper is a prolegomena to the adaptation of a content analytic measure from psychology to help in the linguistic study of writer's stance. The DOTA measure of dogmatism is applied to learner and native-speaker corpora and the results used as a starting point for more detailed corpus analysis of word and phrase frequencies. By isolating those words and phrases which are underused, overused or avoided by apprentice writers, first steps are taken towards suggesting how apprentice writers might improve their documents.