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This article reports a corpus-aided analysis of stance adverbs within published judicial opinions from the 12 geographically-apportioned districts of the United States (US) Federal Courts of Appeals. The study first analyzes stance adverbs previously investigated in US Supreme Court decisions in order to more comprehensively explore these interactional features across multiple levels of the judicial system. Following this initial analysis, the study then examines variation in the use of stance adverbs between majority and dissenting opinions in Courts of Appeals opinions to identify salient similarities and differences in frequency and function in the two opinion types. The initial analysis reveals divergence in stance adverb use between the Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court and between legal writing and other registers, indicating the prevalence and importance of stance adverbs within legal writing. Additionally, the study notes variation in stance adverbs between majority and dissenting opinions. This article details the variation of stance adverbs across these aforementioned contexts, discusses how the variation noted in the corpus analysis at times conflicts with the advice of legal writing style guides, and offers pedagogical implications of these findings for English for Legal Purposes instruction.

This paper analyzes the use of evaluative adjectives within letters to the shareholders from the top 100 corporations from the 2016 Fortune 500 list. The letter represents an important promotional genre and is published annually to report financial performance while also projecting a vision for future success and continued growth. These influential messages detail and frame institutional vision and strategy as they attempt to maintain relationships with current investors while attracting new ones. This paper adopts Thompson and Hunston's term of evaluation and its definition as “the expression of the speaker or writer's attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or proposition” (2000, p. 5) as it investigates the semantic classes of evaluative adjectives present in the letters and their function within this ESP genre of interest. While there are many features that reflect and realize evaluation, adjectives are the focus of this inquiry because their overt evaluative quality makes them an accessible item to extract and analyze with basic corpus techniques which could be taught and applied within a classroom setting. This paper reports the use of evaluative adjectives while also displaying that little salient variation exists between a sub-corpus of only 10 letters and the full corpus collection. With little noticeable variation and numerous learning affordances, a pedagogically-downsized specialized corpus can be easily compiled, analyzed, and implemented in EBP and other ESP contexts.