Stance Markers In Academic Writings By Chinese Researchers

While it is widely acknowledged that stance markers, as one of the most efficient devices to convey personal perspective, constitute a significant part in academic writing, their roles in second or foreign language learning have not been obtained adequate attention so far.This study adopts corpus-based approach and operates automatic processing of Chinese Researchers Academic Writing (CRAW) and Native Speaker Academic Writing (NSAW) compiled by the present author by virtue of such data processing software or programs as FoxPro, SPSS and Antconc. After the extraction of 1,305 stance markers involved in the present study from the two corpora and the calculations and interpretations of those stance markers in terms of overall frequency, semantic meaning and syntactic structures, the present thesis aims to reveal the characteristics of them in Chinese researchers'academic writing and thus assist them to present their achievements more appropriately in international platform.As is revealed in this study, most stance markers are shared by Chinese and foreign researchers in English academic writing, but they show significant difference concerning the total amount, semantic meaning and syntactic structure. In terms of the total amount, the types of stance markers by Chinese researchers are far from diversified than that by the native researchers and they seem to over frequently use some stance markers, like can, know. As for the semantic meaning, the Chinese researchers are inclined to select those connoting over stiff and definite meaning, like should, certain. As regards syntactic structure, the proportions of verbs, adverbs, adjectives, nouns and modals by Chinese and native researchers are similar, but each word class in two corpora is significantly different.After the contrastive analysis of the features of stance markers in Chinese researchers' academic writing with NSAW, this paper has proved that in order to increase the accuracy of argumentation, report their scientific achievements politely and protect themselves from criticism arising from their peers, the Chinese researchers will also resort to the efficient and effective strategy of stance markers to achieve their goals. This study will provide some references for the foreign and second academic writing teaching and interlanguage investigation.