A Corpus-based Comparative Study On Stance Markers In MA Theses Of Chinese And Austrian English Majors

Last three decades have witnessed an increase in relevant studies on stance markers in the linguistic field.As academic discourse serves as a way of constructing social identity,authors of academic discourse use a series of methods to express the authorial identity when reporting their findings.Devices that can show the author's attitudes,evaluations,and statements regarding a particular proposition are called stance markers.Studies have shown that by using these devices properly and effectively,the quality of academic discourse will be improved.A plethora of research has also confirmed the importance of stance markers in evaluating the quality of academic writing and constructing authorial identities.When browsing these studies,it is easy to find that most of them center on comparisons of academic discourse written by Chinese and native English speakers.Few of them concentrate on comparisons between academic discourse written by Chinese English learners and English learners from other countries.Based on this situation,the current study conducted a corpus-based comparative study on Chinese English majors and Austrian English majors with the help of the interactive model proposed by Hyland(2005).The author selected a total number of 20 master theses(10 for each)written by Chinese and Austrian masters students in linguistics and established a corpus.Then,the author calculated the concordances of hedges,boosters,attitude markers and self-mention devices in the corpus using AntConc(noisy data were removed manually).This study aims to address the following three research questions:1.What is the distribution feature of stance markers(hedges,boosters,attitude markers,self-mention)in the corpus?2.Are there any significant differences or similarities in the usage of stance markers in the corpus?3.How do Austrian English majors and their Chinese counterparts construct authorial identities in their theses with the help of stance markers?The findings suggest significant differences between Austrian English majors and Chinese English majors in terms of stance markers,but similarities do exist.First,in terms of the frequency stance markers,hedges appeared most frequently in the two corpora,followed by boosters,attitude markers and self-mention.Among all these stance markers,the frequency of hedges,attitude markers and self-mention varied significantly between the two corpora.Compared to Austrian English majors,Chinese English majors used these stance markers less frequently.However,some stance markers have been overused by Chinese students.This situation is,to some extent,caused by the negative transfer to their mother tongue.In other words,Mandarin Chinese has a negative impact on the use of the second language.What is noteworthy is that Chinese students used fewer attitude markers than their Austrian counterparts,as Chinese students are generally taught to avoid immediate presence in academic writing.This also shows the negative transfer to their mother tongue.Additionally,similarities were also found when stance markers were further classified into modal verbs,verbs,adjectives,adverbs and phrases.For instance,Chinese students had a preference of can and could in their works.However,a higher level of flexibility when it comes to using these words is shown in the works of Austrian students.Last but not least,in terms of identity construction,Chinese students used expressions such as we to show their presence in academic writing,while Austrian students put an emphasis on themselves in their own research.This could be attributed to cultural differences,language teaching(Chinese students are generally taught to avoid using pronouns that can directly show their presence in academic writing),and the level of English of the author.This thesis has both theoretical and practical use for the subject.Theoretically speaking,the comparison between Austrian and Chinese students expands the applicability of Hyland's(2005)interactive model and offers possible ideas for future research.Practically speaking,this study helps to understand how English learners differ between countries in terms of writing habits and helps to improve Chinese students' writing ability and to improve the teaching of writing in China.