Pragmatic Functions Of Epistemic Adjectives In English Academic Discourses By Chinese Scholars

By comparing the self-compiled Corpus of English Academic Discourses of Chinese Scholars(CRAC,80000 words)and its reference Corpus of English Academic Discourses(CRAR,400000 words),we observe the use of epistemic adjectives and attempt to find out their distributive features and their pragmatic functions.Based on fuzzy linguistics and pragmatics,through corpus processing such as editing,part-of-speech tagging,concordance performing,and statistical analyzing,the results indicate that(1)CRAC has less epistemic adjectives than CRAR(2)epistemic adjectives of indefinite degree are the most frequent in CRAR,and(3)shields occur less in CRAC than in CRAR with a significant difference.Pragmatically,these features reveal Chinese scholars’ willingness to establish their professional image,to increase acceptability of their research,and to shoulder academic responsibility.However,they also show that Chinese scholars should reconsider their cognition about the"definiteness" of research,reader awareness and academic power distance.