It-clauses with adjectival predicates in English-medium articles: disciplinary and linguacultural considerations.

Abstract

This article examines it-clauses with adjectival predicates in 240 English-medium articles by Polish and Anglophone authors representing medicine and psychology, aiming to investigate how disciplinary and linguacultural constraints affect the frequency, in-text distribution, and semantic, syntactic, and lexical variability of the structure. The study attempts to address a gap in previous research, which has not yet compared these two disciplines and linguacultural contexts to reveal how they differ in their use of the device to express the writer’s stance. The results show that it-clauses are significantly more frequent in psychology and that the disciplines differ in the degree to which they exploit various aspects of the evaluative potential of the structure, although both use it most heavily in discussions, and prioritize to-infinitive clauses and evaluative predicates. The latter preference, as the study reveals, is marked only in Polish articles, where prominence is given to those features of it-clauses that are frequent in popular and non-native English writing. The features preferred in Anglophone articles are more typical of proficient writing.