“Attitude and episteme in academic discourse: adverbials of stance across genres and moves”

The paper is based on the analysis of comparable homogenous corpora of academic texts, including abstracts, research articles and textbook chapters. Focusing on adverbials of stance, the paper tries to highlight the forms and functions of evaluative metadiscourse across genres. Biber’s classification – and the class of “attitude adverbials” in particular - is discussed against the data in our corpus. Particular attention is paid to planes of discourse and the way the affect the expression of stance. Variation across genres is related to the different role played by reflexivity in the different genres. The paper also discusses a working methodology for the analysis of evaluation in academic English that unites the interest in structural aspects with the interest in interactive and socio-cultural processes.