Author stance in doctoral dissertations of native and non-native speakers of English: a corpus-based study on epistemic adverbs

Abstract

Our study concentrates on the epistemic adverbs used in conveying author stance in academic English. The Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger, 1996) was run to three sets of corpora comprising doctoral dissertations written by native and non-native academic authors of English. Epistemic adverbs occurring in the dissertations were identified through a computer programme and their frequencies were separately computed for each corpus. Lastly, a log-likelihood test was administered to see whether there is a statistically significant difference across the groups in concern concerning the use of these adverbs.

Nuestro estudio se centra en los adverbios epistémicos que se usan para indicar el punto de vista de un autor en inglés académico. El Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger, 1996) se aplica a tres grupos de corpus de tesis doctorales escritas en inglés por autores nativos y no nativos. Usando medios informáticos, se identificaron los adverbios.