Stance Adverbials in Engineering Thesis Abstracts

This paper reports a study on how L2 writers make their stance in 30 doctoral theses in the field of Engineering. The results show that adverbials are widely employed in theses abstracts and are important means for indicating the degree of writer's certainty about the presented information. We also found that writers expressed their evaluations using different adverbial stance types and at varying frequency according to the rhetorical moves commonly found in abstracts. Among these three domains, epistemic stance seemed to enjoy the highest frequency of use. This study shed some lights into how non -native writers use adverbials to mark their stance and comment on certainty and reliability of their research.