The ability to achieve social interaction is both a key feature of research writing and an important aspect of advanced academic literacy. It can be seen in how doctoral students employ rhetorical resources to acknowledge limitations in thesis writing while securing a positive view of the research. Negation is one of the crucial interactional options, but less explored in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) literature. In this study, we drew on the appraisal theory to see negation as a disclaim marker that engaged with alternative positions and employed corpus analysis to examine the forms and functions of negation in the ‘limitations’ section of doctoral theses. To better understand how student writers exploit negation to achieve the rhetorical end, we further explored co-articulations of negation with other appraisal resources. A corpus-based analysis of 100 doctoral theses by Chinese and American doctoral students in applied linguistics showed that American students made significantly more use of negation, especially pairing negation with engagement and graduation resources. We attribute the difference to genre and culture norms and also raise pedagogical implications on the cultivation of students’ rhetorical awareness and the classroom teaching of research writing.

中文翻译：

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“结果可能并不能完全代表……”：中美学生对博士论文局限性部分的否定

实现社交互动的能力既是研究写作的关键特征，也是高级学术素养的一个重要方面。从博士生如何利用修辞资源承认论文写作的局限性，同时确保对研究的积极看法中可以看出这一点。否定是重要的互动选项之一，但在学术英语 (EAP) 文献中探讨较少。在这项研究中，我们借鉴了评价理论看否定作为一个放弃参与替代职位并利用语料库分析来检查替代职位的形式和功能的标记否定在博士论文的“局限性”部分。为了更好地了解学生作家如何利用否定为了达到修辞目的，我们进一步探索了共同表达否定和其他人评价资源。对中美应用语言学博士生的 100 篇博士论文进行的语料库分析表明，美国学生明显更多地使用否定，特别是配对否定和订婚和毕业资源。我们将这种差异归因于体裁和文化规范，并提出了对学生修辞意识培养和研究性写作课堂教学的教学意义。