A CORPUS BASED ANALYSIS ON ATTITUDE MARKERS IN ENGLISH DOCTORAL DISSER-TATIONS WRITTEN IN KENYAN UNIVERSITIES

Abstract

English is widely used for academic purposes in Kenya and globally. In academic writing the authors de-scribe, analyze, and evaluate the development of their research. Metadiscourse markers are used to organize the discourse, engage the audience, and signal the writer's attitude. The writer's attitude is signaled by the use of attitude markers. Attitude markers refer to expressions used in a text to reflect writers' position to-ward both the content in the text and the reader. Attitude markers include deontic modal verbs, lexical verbs, adjectives, and affective adverbs. This study examined the use of attitude markers in doctoral disser-tations written by English second language writers, studying English for academic purposes in Kenya. The data was drawn from the introduction, discussion and conclusion chapters of a randomly compiled corpus of twenty dissertations from eleven universities across Kenya. Hyland (2005) framework of metadiscourse markers was used to identify and code the markers. The data was analyzed using Antconc text 4.1.4 analy-sis tool, Wilcoxon sum rank test and Log-likelihood statistics to investigate how attitude markers are used. This study revealed that every category of attitude markers was used across all chapters. The discussion chapter had the highest usage relative to other chapters. While the conclusion chapter contained the least number of attitude markers. The findings of this study offer valuable insights into the use of attitude mark-ers in academic writing and can help guide the development of English for academic purposes course mate-rials to improve the academic writing skills of doctoral students in Kenya.