AUTHOR STANCE IN ACADEMIC WRITING: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY ON EPISTEMIC VERBS

Stance refers to the lexical and grammatical expression of attitudes, feelings, judgments, or commitment concerning the propositional content of a message (Biber and Finegan, 1989). The present study is focused on epistemic verbs used in conveying author's stance in Academic English. Being corpus-based in design, it investigates whether native and non-native speakers of English significantly differ with respect to the use of these items through the Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger, 1996) of doctoral dissertations written by native, Turkish-speaking and Spanish-speaking speakers of English. Findings of the study have indicated that Turkish-speaking group tends to be more confident and the native and Spanish-speaking groups are relatively more cautious in their academic writing. The study ends with a couple of reasons for these particular findings and a few instructional suggestions for academic writing.