“The results might not fully represent…”: Negation in the limitations sections of doctoral theses by Chinese and American students

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.