Case Study Of Chinese College Students' Oral English Professional Position Markers Corpus-based Use

Language is of great importance in the process of expressing emotion, assessment, attitude and stance. In recent years, the studies of evaluation language have been of interest to an increasing number of scholars at home and abroad, including the studies of stance markers. But most of the studies focus on the written discourse while studies of stance markers in spoken discourse are very rare. The present study is dedicated to the usage of stance markers in spoken discourse.This study has adopted the framework developed by Biber and his colleagues in Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, aiming to find the differences in the usage of stance markers between Chinese English majors and native English-speakers with the help of the theory of corpus linguistics. Based on the analysis of the differences, it attempts to offer some advice in the teaching of spoken English in Chinese colleges.The corpora employed in this study are the spoken sub-corpus of Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL) and the spoken sub-corpus of British National Corpus (BNC). The latter is used for reference so as to make a comparison. Based on the grammatical classification of stance markers by Biber and his colleagues, stance markers are extracted from the corpora. Stance modals, stance adverbials, degree adverbs, stance complements and stance prepositional phrases are investigated in both of the corpora respectively.The study shows that the tendency of the usage of stance markers is similar between the two language users, but the frequencies are different in an obvious way. The overall frequency of stance markers of each category in SECCL is higher than those in BNC, but overuse and underuse are very common. In addition, the causes of these differences are discussed, including language differences, communication strategies, and the shortage of second language input and the influence of test.