Stance is among important discursive practices that, through items categorized epistemic, attitude, and style (Biber et. Al, 1999), writers construct themselves within the text through arranging probability and certainty of their claims and managing propositional statements. About stance construction, in the literature, little is known about how different discourses, including medical academic discourse, deal with linguistic items. Thus, the aim of this study is to investigate the frequency, function, and distribution of adverbials listed by Biber et. al’s (1999) within English RPs of Turkish scholars and to outline characteristics of medical academic discourse in terms of organizing modality within the texts

Based on genre analysis framework, a corpus of 150 English research papers by Turkish academics published between 2015-2016 in the journals indexed in pubmed database was analyzed through WordSmith Tools to examine frequency, distribution, and function of adverbials as referring to stance construction

The results show that Turkish academics tend to use the lexis of epistemic stance more frequently compared to the other two categories, attitude and style. Within this category, the semantic preferences are seen to be commonly oriented around certainty/doubt, actuality/reality, source of knowledge, and limitation. In conclusion, these findings may suggest that, regarding stance construction, the semantic categories chosen seemingly show the effect of permanent medical discourse.

Keywords: Stance, English RPs, Turkish Scholars, Medical Academic Discourse, Genre Analysis