Hooking the reader: a corpus study of evaluative that in abstracts

The linguistic resources used by academic writers to adopt a position and engage with readers, variously described as evaluation, stance and metadiscourse, have attracted increasing attention in the literature over the last 10 years and now form an important element of many ESP courses. A relatively overlooked interpersonal feature, however, is what we shall call `evaluative that'. This is a structure which allows a writer to thematize attitudinal meanings and offer an explicit statement of evaluation by presenting a complement clause within a super-ordinate clause (as in We believe that this is an interesting construction). In this paper, we explore the frequencies, forms and functions of evaluative that in two corpora of 465 abstracts from published research articles and masters and doctoral dissertations written by L2 students. Comparing student and published use of the structure across six disciplines, we find evaluative that is widely employed in these abstracts and is an important means of providing author comment and evaluation. We also show similarities and differences in how these groups used the structure by exploring what writers chose to evaluate, the stances they took, the source they attributed the stance to, and how they expressed their evaluations.