Journal
Papers of the Linguistic Society of Belgium, vol. 17 (2023)
Author(s)
Pauline Jadoulle (UCLouvain)
Abstract
In the past decades, studies in the field of ‘littéracies universitaires’ (‘academic literacies’) have highlighted a number of evaluative freatures typical of French novice academic writing, such as an assertive and personal tone (e.g. Donahue 2002, Rinck 2011). However, such studies are largely qualitative, usually focus on a limited number of texts, and are typically based on theoretically-grounded concepts such as ‘posture’ and ‘image du scripteur’ (‘writer’s image’). The present study aims to fill this gap by conducting a quantitative corpus-based investigation of French novice writing, and using a larger set of data. The analyses are carried out by comparing a corpus of French novice academic writing with a corpus of French expert academic writing. The focus is placed on stance, and more precisely on epistemic and attitudinal adverbials and complement clauses. Results help to nuance previous findings on French novice writing. On the one hand, French novices do not necessarily take on a more asssertive tone that French experts. In fact, they were found to be more tentative than their expert counterparts as they tend to overuse hedges like sembler and peut-être. On the other hand, novices were shown to adopt a more attitude-laden tone than experts, which is in line with findings highlighted by more qualitative studies.