Evaluation and stance are central to academic discourse, shaping how knowledge is constructed, negotiated, and legitimized within disciplinary communities. Among the linguistic resources that realize evaluation, adjectives occupy a particularly complex and theoretically rich position, functioning at the intersection of grammar, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. This article offers an extensive, theoretically grounded analysis of adjectives as carriers of evaluation and authorial stance in academic writing, drawing strictly on established linguistic scholarship in grammar, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and appraisal theory. Integrating insights from structuralist linguistics, functional grammar, corpus-based studies, and critical discourse analysis, the study examines how adjectives contribute to epistemological positioning, argumentation, and interpersonal meaning in scholarly texts. The article situates adjectives within broader systems of stance marking, alongside adverbs, evidentials, and metadiscursive devices, while emphasizing their unique capacity to encode gradability, subjectivity, and disciplinary norms. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, text-based analytical framework informed by corpus findings reported in the literature, allowing for a nuanced interpretation of adjectival evaluation without reliance on numerical modeling. The results demonstrate that adjectives play a crucial role in shaping claims, signaling alignment or distance from prior research, and negotiating authority within academic communities. The discussion highlights theoretical implications for models of evaluation, addresses limitations inherent in text-based analyses, and outlines directions for future research, particularly in cross-linguistic and pedagogical contexts. Overall, the article argues that adjectives are not merely descriptive elements but fundamental resources for the construction of academic voice and epistemic responsibility.

Academic discourse, adjectives, evaluation

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