SEMANTIC FEATURES OF STANCE TAKING: AN ANALYSIS OF L1 SERBIAN/L2 ENGLISH WRITING AT THE TERTIARY LEVEL

Abstract

Stance taking is a topic of some interest in the L2 English language teaching and learning com- munity. So far it has been analyzed in a variety of foreign languages. In the Serbian linguistic environment, it has been the focus of studies carried out by Blagojević (2004, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012), and Veličković and Danilović Jeremić (2020, 2021), inter alia. Some of the reasons why it is a topic of interest are the various types of stance that can be assumed and the various types of both syntactic and lexical units that can be used to convey it. It is also a component of L2 writing that needs to be explicitly addressed in the EFL classroom. With that in mind, the aim of this study is to continue with the work previously done on a variety of syntactic units used to convey stance in the L1 Serbian/L2 English environment, by extending it to include lexical/ semantic features associated with stance taking. In particular, the focus will be on adjectival and verbal collexemes (as per Wang et al. 2022), in combination with the introductory it-pattern. The analysis will be carried out on a corpus of expository essays written by fourth-year English language majors attending the University of Niš. The results should shed further light on where proficient L1 Serbian students of English stand on this particular topic, and combined with previous results, will clarify which steps need to be taken further.