چکیده:
Using evaluative language has been considered as the significant predictor of academic writing success in second and foreign language research. Such an importance paved the way for the current study to investigate the use of the APPRAISAL tool, namely ATTITUDE resources, in the research articles (RAs) written by native (N) and non-native (NN) writers, focusing on the discussion sections. A qualitative corpus selection resulted in choosing 30 RAs written by American writers and 30 authored by Iranian writers. Two coding schemes were used: one for discussion boundaries based on Kanoksilapatham’s (2005) discussion move structure, and the modified version of APPRAISAL theory (Xu, 2017) for identifying attitudinal resources. The corpus analysis revealed that academic writers preferred to use a great number of inscribed ATTITUDE resources, that is, APPRECIATION tools compared to JUDGMENT. There was also a significant difference between N and NN sub-corpora in using attitudinal resources, highlighting that the language of N RAs contained more authorial stance of ATTITUDE compared to NN sub-corpus. However, the use of idioms as evoked ATTITUDE was found to be frequently applied by NN authors. The findings of the study contributed to the significance of using evaluative language in academic writing through which the writers can make a dialogic interaction with readers and enhance their critical stance by involving them in the argument.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Such an importance paved the way for the current study to investigate the use of the APPRAISAL tool, namely ATTITUDE resources, in the research articles (RAs) written by native (N) and non-native (NN) writers, focusing on the discussion sections.
The findings of the study contributed to the significance of using evaluative language in academic writing through which the writers can make a dialogic interaction with readers and enhance their critical stance by involving them in the argument.
Evaluative language and stance-taking strategies have been studied from a variety of approaches, both from a functional approach (Hyland, 1998; Martin & White, 2005; Ochs & Schieffelin, 1989; Hunston & Thompson, 2000) and from a linguistic approach (Dressen, 2003; Tucker, 2003).
This study provides a comprehensive linguistic explanation of the concepts of stance and voice in the Discussion section of N and NN RAs. The analyses of this study indicate how evaluative language is strategized through structuring of academic texts, and through co- articulating interpersonal meaning with textual and ideational meaning.
The study findings revealed that published authors employed more linguistic resources relevant to the APPRECIATION type of ATTITUDE to evaluate results whereas student authors developed their texts as more subjective and personal utilizing JUDGEMENT and AFFECT attitudes.
In a different yet relevant study, Liu and Thompson (2009) examined the utilization of evaluative language in EFL learners’ argumentative writing in both Chinese and English based on APPRAISAL theory.
To fill this gap, the present study investigated APPRAISAL ATTITUDE systems in English academic discourse written by N and NN speakers in the discussion sections of RAs by addressing the following research questions: RQ1.