“The results might not fully represent…”
Negation in the limitations sections of doctoral theses by Chinese and American students
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 17811405 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Shuyi Amelia Sun (0000-0002-7424-0002, Jilin University), Feng Jiang (0000-0001-7369-9498, Jilin University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 365-389 |
| Publication date | 2024-04-10 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Text and Talk (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1860-7330 • E-ISSN: 1860-7349 |
| Publisher | De Gruyter (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/text-2023-0076 |
| OpenAlex | W4394688187 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 49 |
The ability to achieve social interaction is both a key feature of research writing and an important aspect of advanced academic literacy. It can be seen in how doctoral students employ rhetorical resources to acknowledge limitations in thesis writing while securing a positive view of the research. Negation is one of the crucial interactional options, but less explored in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) literature. In this study, we drew on the appraisal theory to see negation as a disclaim marker that engaged with alternative positions and employed corpus analysis to examine the forms and functions of negation in the ‘limitations’ section of doctoral theses. To better understand how student writers exploit negation to achieve the rhetorical end, we further explored co-articulations of negation with other appraisal resources. A corpus-based analysis of 100 doctoral theses by Chinese and American doctoral students in applied linguistics showed that American students made significantly more use of negation , especially pairing negation with engagement and graduation resources. We attribute the difference to genre and culture norms and also raise pedagogical implications on the cultivation of students’ rhetorical awareness and the classroom teaching of research writing
Epistemology · Linguistics · Negation · Pragmatics · Sociology · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Doctoral Education Challenges and Solutions · Philosophy · scientometrics and bibliometrics research
Negation in thesis and dissertation abstracts by English, Chinese, and Iranian writers from a cross-cultural perspective
Utilization of appraisal resources for acknowledging limitations within doctoral theses across disciplines
Exemplification and its local grammar patterns in English as an academic lingua franca in research writing
“Such comparison fails to …”
Standard Negation
Appraising Research
Academic Writing for Graduate Students, 3rd Edition
Disciplinary and ethnolinguistic influences on citation in research articles
Qualification and certainty in L1 and L2 students' writing
Research articles in applied linguistics
“The findings might not be generalizable”
“The datasets do not agree”
“Maybe, but probably not”
“Establish a niche” via negation
An intercultural analysis of the use of hedging by Chinese and Anglophone academic English writers
A stepwise method for annotating appraisal
The role of appraisal and corpora in detecting covert evaluation
‘Our striking results demonstrate …’
Construing Evaluation Through Patterns
The fact that
Stance and engagement
The function of negation in argumentation
Hedging and boosting in abstracts of applied linguistics articles
Indirectness in L1 and L2 academic writing
| Citations per year | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |