Epistemic lexical verbs in academic writing: A corpus-based comparative study of L1 English and L1 Chinese writers of English

Epistemic lexical verbs (ELVs) are critical to English academic writing where writers need to deliver their statements with an appropriate level of modesty and certainty. Drawing on Hyland’s (1998) taxonomy of ELVs, the study combines both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine how L1 Chinese writers use ELVs to express modality differently from L1 English writers in terms of frequency, range, sentence and grammatical construction. The investigation was conducted on two specialised corpora, comprising academic texts written by postgraduate students of L1 Chinese and L1 English respectively. The findings indicate that L1 Chinese writers tend to rely on a different range of devices and express a stronger commitment. Moreover, L1 Chinese students’ usage of ELVs is less balanced in terms of the grammatical patterns and sentence constructions, and some misuses can be identified in their writing. The authors also highlight the potential reasons behind these findings and propose pedagogical suggestions to improve learners’ pragmatic competence in this important area.