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Volume 13. Issue 3
Article 9

Title
Contrastive Rhetoric: Inflation, Verbal Voices and Polyphonic Visibility in Learners and Native Speakers’ Academic Writing

Mousa A. Btoosh, Ph. D&Abeer Q. Taweel, Ph. D.
Al-Hussein Bin Talal University

Biodata
Mousa A. Btoosh is an Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Literature at Al-Hussein Bin Talal University, Jordan. He has taught in the USA and Jordan for more than 6 years. His specialist interests focus on corpus linguistics, ESL, discourse analysis, phonology and syntax.

Abeer Q. Taweel is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Literature at Al-Hussein Bin Talal University, Jordan. She has taught in the USA and Jordan for more than 5 years. Her specialist interests focus on discourse analysis, semantics, rhetoric and ESL.

Abstract
This study seeks to explore the use of inflation and over-assertion devices, verbal voices and polyphonic visibility in L2 learners’ and native speakers’ academic writing. For specific contrastive goals, special attention has been paid to hedges and downtoners. Deliberate attempts have been made throughout the paper to uncover the reasons underlying the deviation in L2 learners’ use of the target language features. The database for the study consists of two equal-sized corpora, namely, the Interlanguage Corpus of Arab Students of English and a similar size from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays.Findings show that learners’ L2 writing is characterized by numerous rhetorical features primarily attributed to L1 influence and learners’ general tendencies. Chief among these features are learners’ overuse of intensifiers, underuse of passive voice, and a clear visibility in the text.

Keywords: Rhetoric, intensifiers, hedges, verbal voices, personal pronouns.