A Contrastive Study Of Stance Markers Between Chinese English Speakers And Native English Speakers

When communicating propositional meanings to the audiences and readers, speakers and writers meanwhile inevitably expose their personal feelings, attitudes, value judgment, or assessment; that is to say, they convey a "stance". In the present study, linguistic devices for the expression of stance are called stance markers.Playing an important role in achieving interaction engagement with both the contents and the audiences, stance markers are richly studied and loads of literatures of theoretical and empirical studies seemingly help turn them from "backstage workers" to "stage actors". Especially, empirical studies of stance markers comparing native and nonnative in formal argumentative writing are the hottest in present days. Approaching from a new genre type and collecting data from "Opinion" column in the website of China Daily, the study explores the stance markers in cyber discourse which lies between rigid, strict pattern and less-organized, free daily talking. To fulfill the objective, two questions are raised:a) what are the general distributions of English stance markers between Chinese English speakers and native English people in the "Opinion" column of China Daily? b) What are the similarities and differences in the use of stance markers of the two groups?To answer these two questions, the study begins with building two mini self-built corpora, namely Chinese English Speakers Corpus (CESC) and Native English Speakers Corpus (NESC). In order to explore the similarities and differences in the use of stance markers between them, a quantitative and qualitative analysis in terms of grammatical and semantic categories is carried out. The study yields the results in terms of similarities and differences:1) the frequency pattern of using stance markers in terms of grammatical or semantic classification in both CESC echoes that of NESC. Taking factors as English proficient levels into consideration, it indicates that the Chinese advanced English speakers basically have shared awareness with the natives of utilizing stance markers to mark their stance.2) From the perspective of grammatical category, Chinese English speakers tend to adopt more stance modals, stance adverbials than stance complement clauses compared with the natives, which reveals Chinese English learners’relatively low variety of adoption choice in structures as well as difficulty in putting large vocabulary stores into practices; from the perspective of semantic category, Chinese English speakers use more attitudinal stance markers and more style stance markers than the natives. The overuse of emotion and evaluation stance markers in attitudinal category conveys a feeling of explicitness, directness, which surprisingly contradicts with Chinese traditional culture of courtesy and indirectness, which brings the problem of pragmatic competence to light. Finally, some implications are put forward for pragmatic competence cultivation and foreign language teachings.