The importance of, it is important that or importantly?

Abstract

The ability to successfully position oneself in relation to one’s claims through the use of stance markers is of central importance for academic writers. This study, which uses data from one expert corpus (LOCRA) and three learner corpora (ALEC, VESPA and BATMAT), investigates the use of morphologically related stance markers that occur in different syntactic constructions (such as possibly, the possibility of and it is possible that). In doing so, it examines to what extent lexis, level of expertise in academic writing and L1 transfer influence the distribution of the different realizations of stance under investigation. The results show that all three variables are important predictors. In addition, differences pertaining to information structure are found to influence the distribution of two largely synonymous constructions (disjuncts and the introductory it pattern). The findings suggest that there are principled explanations for why one construction is used instead of another functionally similar construction.