Zehtab, Mina

Epistemic Features of Generality in Conclusion Sections of Research Articles Written in English: A Comparison of L1-English and L1-Persian Native Speakers Across Applied Linguistics and Power System Engineering

AbstractStance markers play significant roles in social and academic settings and recentresearches highlight the increasing emphasis on stance markers in various levels ofacademic writings across disciplines In spite of the fact that linguists have beeninterested in analyzing stance markers indicating certainty rather than generality ofclaims the novice and expert academic writers need to have knowledge of stancemarkers to limit or exceed generality of their claims in English This comparativestudy analyzed the use of intensifiers and indefinite pronouns indicating generalityacross the two disciplines of Applied Linguistics AL and Power SystemEngineering PSE rhetorically and pointed out any cross cultural and cross disciplinary differences in terms of the frequency of stance markers in 329 conclusionsections of academic research articles The findings of this study revealed that thefrequency of indefinite pronouns was more than intensifiers in both English NativeSpeakers E1 L1 and Iranian Persian Native Speakers P1 L1 corpus and therecurrence of qualified generalization markers in P1 L1 corpus was more frequentlythan E1 L1 corpus Moreover the AL conclusion sections of research articles werecontained more generalization and qualified generalization stance markers than thosein PSE Implications of this study shed light on how to represent authorial voice inresearch articles in order to improve the persuasive quality of academic writings Keywords Epistemic stance Generality Stance markers Qualified generalizationmarkers Generalization markers vii