Uncertainty Avoidance and Its Relationship to Rhetorical Variation: A Corpus Study of Quantification, Frequency, and Prediction

More comprehensive analysis of cultural values is needed to enhance our understanding of rhetorical variation in argumentative writing. To broaden our perspective, the present study quantitatively investigated the relationship between grammatical features of certainty and the cultural value of uncertainty avoidance. A total of 7,673 English essays from 29 different countries were collected from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE). After the essays were separated by country, grammatical features of quantity, frequency, and prediction were tallied and correlated to empirical values for uncertainty avoidance using the Pearson formula. Selected quantifiers and frequency adverbs which expressed absolute values (all and always) were positively correlated to support for uncertainty avoidance. In contrast, several features of quantity, frequency, and prediction that included a degree of doubt were negatively correlated (a great deal of, some, most, a great many, seldom, and may). Results suggest a link between argumentative rhetoric and the cultural dimension of uncertainty avoidance. Additional research will be needed to triangulate the findings and explore potential causal relationships between a writer’s cultural values and use of rhetorical strategies.