Evaluative that patterns : a corpus-based study of that-clauses in academic writing

Abstract

In the field of applied linguistics, there is a growing body of literature that recognizes the importance of the interaction between writers and readers in academic texts. While the academic work on interpersonal features of language use has been conducted under various frameworks such as evaluation (Hunston, 2000), stance (Biber & Finegan, 1989), appraisal (Martin, 2000), and metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005a), central to this existing literature in academic discourse studies is the concept of interaction and evaluation in academic texts. In academic writing, one effective way to evaluate an author’s own findings, the findings of others, methods, and theories is to package propositional information in that constructions (Charles, 2006b; Hyland & Tse, 2005a, 2005b; Parkinson, 2013b), which are often referred to as evaluative that-clauses (Hyland & Tse, 2005a, 2005b). It has been suggested that this evaluative construction can serve as a powerful tool, since the construction not only provides writers with various options for the types of propositions being evaluated, but also enables them to thematize the evaluation by signaling either epistemic or attitudinal stance towards the propositional content (Hyland & Tse, 2005a, 2005b). Adopting a corpus-based approach, this thesis investigates expressions of evaluation and stance signaled via that-complement clauses in two key genres of academic writing across two contrasting disciplines, drawing on Hyland & Tse’s (2005b) model of evaluative that-clauses. The data for the present study are drawn from published research articles (84 articles containing 600,010 words in total) and doctoral theses (12 theses containing 620,547 words in total) across two contrasting disciplines (business studies and medicine, representing soft-applied and hard-applied domains of knowledge respectively). While this thesis is in line with previous studies in arguing that the linguistic construction of evaluative that-clauses can be a strategic rhetorical choice for academic writers in managing their evaluations in various ways, the present study also attempts to fill a gap in the literature by exploring that constructions with reference to both genre and discipline at the same time, while utilizing a novel natural language processing-informed methodology when searching for the syntactic structure of that-complement clauses within the corpora. This study finds that the evaluative that constructions were primarily used by authors to comment on their own and previous findings while most frequently attributing their evaluations to inanimate references, and the features were largely controlled by verbal predicates expressing epistemic assessment towards the evaluated entity. It is also shown that genre and disciplinary conventions are embedded in the use of evaluative that-clauses. This indicates that these discoursal practices of evaluation and interaction through that-clauses are constructed according to the communicative purposes of particular texts and the norms and values of disciplinary communities. Drawing on the findings of this research, this thesis concludes by providing some suggestions for future research while offering theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical perspectives on the evaluative and interactional linguistic features of that-clauses.