Attitude, certainty and allusions to common knowledge in scientific research articles

Authorial Stance in Thai Students’ Doctoral Dissertation

“…These writers were less likely to use verbs, adverbs, and nouns. This finding is consistent with several studies ( (Koutsantoni, 2004;Stotesbury, 2003;Swales & Burke, 2003). Such attitudinal adjectives make a particular text more subjective as they add either a positive or negative judgment to the modified noun, and reflect the writers' favorable position towards the modified noun.…”

“…Findings revealed that the researchers in this study employed boosters to express certainty or to emphasize a point (Dobakhti, 2013;Holmes, 1990;Hyland, 2000;Jalilifar, 2011;Macintyre, 2013). In other words, boosters were used as a certainty marker (Koutsantoni, 2004) or simply as an emphatic (Abdollahzadeh, 2011). They used boosters to put emphasis, add commitment, and express certainty to the claims they made (Holmes, 1990;Hyland, 2000) and to express commitment (Macintyre, 2013).…”

“…They used boosters to put emphasis, add commitment, and express certainty to the claims they made (Holmes, 1990;Hyland, 2000) and to express commitment (Macintyre, 2013). Boosters were tools used to emphasize what writers believed or what they wanted the readers to believe, in other words, increasing force to the propositions (Abdollahzadeh, 2011;Koutsantoni, 2004). Boosters were also used to show a writers' degree of confidence in an assertion (Hyland, 2005, as cited in Hu & Cao,2011).The following examples illustrate these usages.…”

Epistemological and interpersonal stance in a data description task: Findings from a discipline-specific learner corpus

“…The node structures illustrated above are the result of bottom up coding, which means that the categories are not necessarily related to any pre-existing framework for analysis. In this, my approach is different from researchers such as Koutsantoni (2004), Wu (2007) or McGrath & Kurteeva (2011) who all comment that they used frameworks developed by previous researchers as a starting point to code their own data. There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to each approach.…”

“…'the scatter plot above shows that….') Previous research using a stance approach (Koutsantoni 2004) categorises the word show as expressing certainty and commitment. Her corpus includes instances of show being used to imply that the author concurs with overall research findings, e.g.…”