engleski

The use of It-extraposition in MA theses written in English by British, American, Croatian and Serbian students

We report on a corpus study comparing the frequencies of it-extraposition in different meta- discourse roles (Hyland 2005) in MA theses by British, American, Serbian, and Croatian students. It has been suggested that non-native speakers use hedging devices less frequently (Gomaa 2019) and boosters and attitude markers more frequently (Hewings & Hewings 2002) than native speakers. We employed a custom-made parallel corpus of MA theses in Linguistics by US, UK, Croatian and Serbian students (Varga et al. 2020) to compare native and non-native speak-ers in these regards. We found that, in the overall corpus, it-extraposition is used most frequently as a booster and least frequently as an attitude marker. Non-native speakers use this construction more frequently than native speakers, and this applies to each of the three meta-discourse functions individually.

comparable corpus, student corpus, Academic English, meta-discourse, it-extraposition

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