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Register Studies
Vol. 1:2 (2019) ► pp.243–268

Grammatical stance marking across registers

Revisiting the formal-informal dichotomy

| Uppsala University | Université catholique de Louvain

There are sets of grammatical stance markers that are morphologically and semantically related, but that differ with regard to their syntactic realization (e.g., importantly, it is important that and the importance of). Little attention has, however, been paid to how these pattern across registers. This study examines eleven such sets across five registers in apprentice and expert production to investigate which register(s) the apprentice writers’ use is closest to and what that can tell us about their adherence to academic norms. The results show that there is a cline from the a priori more formal registers to the less formal registers for the stance markers investigated. When the apprentice writers’ usage was mapped onto this cline, it became clear that their usage diverged slightly from that of the academic experts, thus indicating a lack of register awareness. Yet, very little evidence was found to support previous claims of the ‘spoken-like’ nature of learner writing.

Keywords: grammatical stance marking, registers, learner writing, expert production, level of formality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Data and method
    • 3.1The corpus data
    • 3.2Method
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Distribution across registers
    • 4.2Distribution across the expert and apprentice writing
      • 4.2.1A frequency overview
      • 4.2.2Hedges
      • 4.2.3Boosters
      • 4.2.4Attitude markers
    • 4.3Concluding discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 25 September 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.18009.lar
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