Hooking the reader: a corpus study of evaluative that in abstracts

The linguistic resources used by academic writers to adopt a position and engage with readers, variously described as evaluation, stance and metadiscourse, have attracted increasing attention in the literature over the last 10 years and now form an important element of many ESP courses. A relatively overlooked interpersonal feature, however, is what we shall call `evaluative that'. This is a structure which allows a writer to thematize...