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

Academic writing is not just about conveying an ideational 'content', it is also about the representation of the self (Hyland, 2002, p. 1092). It allows writers 'to gain credibility by projecting an identity invested with the individual authority, displaying confidence in their evaluations and commitment to their ideas (Hyland, 2002, p. 1092). 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.