The Functions of Attitude Markers in Spanish and English Academic Papers on Linguistics and Their Collocations

Academic writing expresses scientific knowledge, but it may do so in different styles depending on the language used. In this respect, some authors have indicated that there are some functional differences in the use and collocations of attitude markers in different languages. The two objectives of this study are to discuss the functional differences in the use of attitude markers in English and Spanish and to identify the collocations of the most frequent attitude markers in both languages. For the analysis, a corpus composed of English and Spanish academic papers on linguistic studies was compiled. The corpus was first analysed with a tool designed to identify metadiscourse markers (METOOL). The results showed that there were in fact differences in the use of attitude markers and the collocations of the most frequent attitude markers. The implications and conclusions drawn from this study were twofold: one was related to the most frequent attitude markers in Spanish and English and the other concerned the identification and comparison of the collocations associated with attitude markers in the two languages.