Publication details
“It is without surprise that...”: Attitude markers in L2 (Czech) student and expert writing in linguistics
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| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In academic writing, attitude markers express a writer’s affective stance towards propositional content, conveying their personal evaluations and emotions. By assuming shared beliefs and responses to content, the writer may attempt to "pull readers into a conspiracy of agreement", making it hard for them to challenge the writer’s position (Hyland, 2005b, p. 180). Since attitude markers are relatively infrequent in written academic registers, they have tended to receive less scholarly attention than epistemic devices such as hedges and boosters, including in studies of doctoral-level writing. Further research is therefore crucial for understanding doctoral students’ writing needs and providing appropriate support. To address this gap, this contribution reports on a corpus study of attitude markers situated within a broader needs analysis of Czech doctoral students’ academic writing. The aim is to investigate differences in the use of attitude markers across all rhetorical sections of 30 Englishmedium PhD theses written by Czech doctoral students and 30 published research articles written by Anglophone scholars. A corpus-based analysis of attitudinal adjectives, adverbs, verbs and nouns, expanding on Hyland (2005a), is carried out in Sketch Engine. Following earlier research on master’s-level writing (Jančaříková, 2023), students may be expected to diverge from experts to some extent due to differences in their levels of expertise and linguacultural backgrounds. The findings should offer practical implications for future academic writing instruction targeted at doctoral students aiming for publication. |
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