Jul 2026· Aposta: Revista de Ciencias Sociales· Vol 24, pp. e1589· 0 citations
Abstract
The current study explores hedging and stance resources in the BAWE corpus to analyse how successful undergraduates achieve academic caution and writer stance in their writing. Based on Hyland’s (2005) model of interactional metadiscourse, this research follows the quantitative corpus-based approach and analyses four types of stance resources: hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions. In total, twelve argumentative and literary analysis essays containing 25,987 words have been analysed via AntConc using frequency, concordance, collocation, and functional analysis. Results show that hedges are the most frequent type of stance markers (42.5%), followed by boosters (20.5%), attitude markers (19.0%) and self-mentions (18.0%), suggesting that successful students prefer to use cautious and tentative argumentation rather than categorical assertions. Analysis of concordance and collocation patterns proves that modal verbs like would, could, may and should are mainly used to denote possibility, hypotheses and tentative interpretation. At the same time, boosters serve as the means of reinforcing claims based on evidence. Evaluative judgment and construction of an authoritative academic writer are achieved by means of attitude markers and self-mentions. This research is important to both corpus linguistics and English for Academic Purposes because it offers empirical data on the rhetorical roles of stance markers in successful academic writing and emphasises the significance of using corpus linguistics methods in teaching students how to write academically and persuasively.
We investigated the use of hedges within Interactive Meta Discourse Markers (IMDM) in a longitudinal learner corpus, comprising one semester of written data from 35 tertiary-level EFL students. The analysis involved both group-level observations to track collective trends in hedge usage over time and individual-level analyses focusing on five students’ use of hedges throughout the semester. A frequency-based approach was employed to identify the most common hedges, which were then compared to native-speaker data to assess similarities and differences, as well as the collective tendencies of both groups regarding hedge usage. The findings revealed that should was the most frequently used hedge in the non-native corpus, with students notably not employing noun phrases in their arguments. The common hedging expressions suggested a pattern of authorial stance, and log-likelihood analysis showed similarities in hedge use. A comparison of the most frequently used hedges indicated an overuse of should within the non-native corpus. Additionally, a correlation was observed between students’ use of hedges and their exam performance over the semester, alongside positive interaction evident in the collective analysis.
Zehra Gürsoy Serdar, A. Özbay· GiST Education and Learning...· 1 citation
This exploratory study examines gendered evaluative expressions in English and Uzbek public discourse from a comparative pragmatic perspective. The analysis draws on an author-compiled purposive dataset of 100 evaluative units, with 50 English and 50 Uzbek items, and focuses on the Attitude subsystem of Appraisal Theory: Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation. The revised analysis treats the corpus as a source-asymmetric exploratory sample rather than as a representative model of either language or culture. Descriptive results show that Judgment is the most frequent Attitude category in both subcorpora (English: 32/50, 64%; Uzbek: 35/50, 70%), followed by Appreciation (24% and 20%) and Affect (12% and 10%). The principal cross-corpus contrast lies not in category frequency but in the contextual values attached to evaluative choices. In the sampled English materials, favorable gender evaluation is frequently associated with agency, competence, leadership, and professional participation. In the sampled Uzbek materials, favorable evaluation more often invokes responsibility, respectability, family relations, moral conduct, and social obligation, while contemporary texts also explicitly contest restrictive gender stereotypes. Because the data were purposively selected and clustered within a limited number of source texts, inferential significance testing is not used. The findings are interpreted as patterns in the sampled discourse rather than as population-level differences between English- and Uzbek-speaking societies. The study demonstrates the value of combining Appraisal Theory with contextual pragmatic analysis while also showing the importance of source matching, transparent coding, and cautious cultural interpretation in cross-linguistic gender research.
F. Baxtiyorova· Science and innovation· 0 citations
In argumentative text types, evidential markers serve to construct credibility, authority, and power. Informed by corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this paper investigates the development of adverbial, phrasal, and clausal inferential adverbials in the Corpus of US Supreme Court Opinions spanning the 1790s to the 2010s. The analysis reveals that therefore constitutes the most common adverbial form but shows a continuous decline throughout the entire time span, with consequently and hence being way less common and demonstrating only minor frequency changes. The prepositional phrases for . . . the reason(s) . . . show an interesting increase but at a lower level. The clausal constructions that is why, this is why, and that’s why represent a fairly recent and infrequent format since the 1940s, with that is why enjoying a steep increase until the 2010s. The qualitative analysis explores the collocations of therefore and for . . . the reasons . . . and examines the text components in which these formats as well as that is why/that’s why are typically found. The findings reveal patterned collocates, including verbs denoting legal agency (AFFIRM, REVERSE, DISSENT), cognitive verbs (CONCLUDE, HOLD, THINK), communicative verbs (PRAY), and the legal adverb void as well as point to striking developments in terms of the subjects which these collocates take. While therefore, for . . . the reasons . . ., and that is why serve as adverbials in the majority and minority opinions, the contracted form that’s why is only used in the transcripts of court trials. It is concluded that the court opinion continues to be an authoritative formal genre. However, there seems to be a shift to a less abstract and more transparent and accessible style. The changing polyphony of voices suggests colloquialization, increasing informality, and democratization of the genre which may be linked to a decreasing discursive authority of the majority opinion of the court.
E. Reber· Journal of English Linguisti...· 1 citation
The use of appropriate rhetorical moves (RMs) and meta-discourse markers (MMs) improve the argumentative and persuasive force of academic texts, such as essays, thesis, seminar papers, and articles. However, authors from different language backgrounds and levels of expertise may use different RMs and MMs when writing in a foreign language. This study is aimed at describing how Indonesian authors in Applied Linguistics use RMs and MMs in their research article abstracts (RAAs) published in international and local journals. 20 RAAs published in international journals and 20 RAAs published in local journals were chosen for the corpora of this study. Swales (2009) five rhetorical moves for RAAs and Hyland's (2005) taxonomy of MMs were used as models in the analyses. The results reveal that different from international journal readers’ expectations, Indonesian authorsin Applied Linguistics use only 3 Moves (Moves 2, 3 & 4) classified as obligatory and 2 Moves (Moves 1 & 5) conventional. Also, they use interactive MMs far more frequently in Moves 3 and 4 because these two moves are relatively longer than the other three moves. As found in other similar studies, the Indonesian authors use interactive MMs far more frequently than interactional MMs because they concern more about their text cohesion, coherence, and convincing rather than their interaction with the potential readers.
Dr Gufran Alam· International journal of all...· 0 citations
This paper investigates the affect heuristic in online argumentative discourse through a corpus-based study combining manual and automatic annotation. Drawing on research in argumentation theory, psychology, and decision science, the study approaches affect not as an external addition to reasoning but as a recurring component of evaluative judgment. The analysis focuses on discussions of climate change and artificial intelligence collected from Reddit and X (formerly Twitter), domains characterised by uncertainty, risk perception, and public controversy. The study employs a bottom-up annotation methodology in which four human annotators identify instances of affect heuristic and related cognitive biases in a corpus of more than 30,000 posts and comments. Inter-annotator agreement is assessed using Fleiss’ κ, Cohen’s κ, Gwet’s AC1, and weighted F1 measures. In a second stage, the same annotation scheme is applied to GPT-4o, treated as a constrained fifth annotator operating within predefined categories and probabilistic classification rules. The results show that the affect heuristic is the most frequent heuristic pattern in the corpus, occurring more often than confirmation bias, availability heuristic, or representativeness heuristic. Although traditional κ coefficients remain low because of category imbalance, agreement measures robust to prevalence effects indicate substantial consistency among annotators. The automatic annotation stage reveals partial alignment between human and model judgments, while also exposing systematic discrepancies in the model’s distribution of categories. A lexical and discursive analysis further demonstrates that affect heuristics do not necessarily manifest through explicit emotion vocabulary. Instead, they frequently appear through evaluative framing, practical reasoning under uncertainty, and subtle stance-taking related to collective action and future-oriented judgment. The findings contribute to empirical research on emotional processes in argumentation and demonstrate how affective reasoning can be operationalised and studied through combined qualitative and computational methods.
Paulina Żelewska, Barbara Konat· Człowiek i społeczeństwo· 0 citations
Due to its combination of lexical, phraseological, and discursive features, stance is susceptible to cross-linguistic influence, especially among novice writers. However, research exploring the relationship between L1 and L2 stance use remains limited, and faces challenges related to attribution, sample size, and comparability. Additionally, much of this research fails to account for individual variation. This paper addresses these gaps by examining the relationship between L1 and L2 stance use in a corpus of paired L1-L2 texts by the same French-speaking students, supplemented by spot checks in a corpus of L1 English novice writing. The results reveal strong similarities in stance marker frequencies and lexical/phraseological preferences across L1 and L2 texts, suggesting that cross-linguistic influence shapes novice writers’ stance use. The findings also highlight the importance of individual variation in stance use, which aligns with recent studies emphasizing the necessity of accounting for such variation when investigating L2 data.
Pauline Jadoulle, Magali Paquot· Research in Corpus Linguisti...· 0 citations