Evaluative that structures in the Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts

Turo HiltunenandIrma Taavitsainen(eds.), Corpus pragmatic studies on the history of medical discourse (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 330). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2022. Pp. vii + 322. ISBN 9789027211101.

“…This study deals with stance as reflected by the so-called stance that -clause, as described by Hyland & Tse (2005a, 2005b), which has a primary interpersonal dimension. The use of the term ‘stance that- clauses’, which I have used in my study of these structures in Late Modern English (see Alonso-Almeida & Álvarez-Gil 2021), following Hyland and colleagues (Hyland & Tse 2005a, 2005b; revised and updated in Hyland & Jiang 2018), seems quite unconvincing, because the that -clause, as it is, appears to have the potential for showing perspective. For that reason, in a recent article (Alonso-Almeida forthcoming), I opted for the phrase ‘stance matrices licensing that- clauses’ to mean the evaluative dimension of these matrices in terms of modulation and involvement concerning the information claimed in the subordinated clauses.…”

“…I wonder whether grouping these verbs by semantic category would have been more visually revealing. These findings could have been compared to those obtained in the study of these structures in CeLiST, as research verbs are preferred over cognitive and communicative verbs in general terms (see Alonso-Almeida & Álvarez-Gil 2021).…”