A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of The Expressions Of Attitudinal Stance Between Chinese And English Students’ Written English

In recent years, the expression of stance has been one of research focuses offunctional linguistics. According to Biber&Finegan (1999:974), stance conveys thefeeling, attitude, emotion or value judgment of the speaker or the writer. Theexpression of stance can be realized by various grammatical means. Biber&Finegandivide stance into three subcategories, namely, epistemic stance, attitudinal stance andstyle stance. A number of studies discovered that English learners, especially foreignEnglish learners tend to overuse, underuse or use less flexibly some types of theexpressions of attitudinal stance compared with native speakers.Combining both quantitative and qualitative research approaches, this studymainly attempts to answer the following three questions. Firstly, what is the realizationof the expressions of attitudinal stance in Chinese and English students’ writtenEnglish? Secondly, what are the differences and similarities of the expressions ofattitudinal stance between Chinese and English students’ written English? Thirdly,what are the possible reasons for the differences between Chinese and Englishstudents’ written English?This study focuses on the expression of attitudinal stance and carries out acomprehensive contrastive analysis of the commonly used attitudinal stance adverbs,attitudinal stance verbs and attitudinal stance adjectives based on the Chinese LearnerEnglish Corpus (CLEC) and British Academic Written English (BAWE). This studyaims to find out the similarities and differences of the expressions of attitudinal stancein Chinese and English students’ written English and the potential reasons for thedifferences. In this study, the commonly used52attitudinal stance adverbs,40attitudinal stance verbs and67attitudinal stance adjectives according to Biber&Finegan (1989) will be surveyed respectively in these two corpora by using Wordsmith 5.0. Besides, SPSS17.0and Microsoft Excel are used to see whether there existssignificant difference on the frequencies of attitudinal stance in these two corpora.The results of the present study indicate that there exists significant differenceon the use of the expressions of attitudinal stance between Chinese and Englishstudents’ written English. Firstly, the expressions of attitudinal stance in Chinese andEnglish students’ written English can be mainly realized by attitudinal stance adverbs,the first form of realization of attitudinal stance verbs and two forms of realization ofattitudinal stance adjectives. Secondly, generally speaking, Chinese learners overusethe expression of attitudinal stance; there exists significant difference on thenormalized frequency of attitudinal stance adverbs, verbs and adjectives; Chineselearners prefer to adopt the explicit device to express their attitudinal stance, whilenative English students prefer to choose the implicit device. Thirdly, the potentialreasons for the differences in Chinese and English students’ written English can beanalyzed from the following four aspects, inadequate input, the first language transfer,different language learning environments and cultural difference.By comparing the similarities and differences of the expressions of attitudinalstance between Chinese and English students’ written English, the present study canprovide some useful suggestions for further studies in the field of attitudinal stance. Atthe same time, it will shed some light for the teachers and students to learn theexpressions of attitudinal stance correctly and effectively, and hence to improve theirlanguage competence.