A Study Of The Use Of Stance Markers By Chinese English Majors In Academic Writing

Stance markers are important linguistic devices to show personal assessments,attitudes,feelings,or judgments towards certain propositional content.They constitute a significant part in academic writing.Yet empirical research on the use of stance markers in the Chinese setting is still limited.This thesis,therefore,intends to find out how Chinese English majors use stance markers in academic writing as compared with expert English writers,and to reveal the relationship between Chinese English majors’ use of stance markers and the quality of their academic writing.To serve this intention,two corpora were constructed:the corpus of Chinese English majors’ writing(CEMW)and the corpus of expert English writers’ writing(EEWW),both containing 20 academic articles.According to the thesis score,the 20 articles in CEMW were further divided into two sub-corpora:the sub-corpus of higher-quality writing(CEMW-H)and the sub-corpus of lower-quality writing(CEMW-L).The 40 articles were tagged manually with a tagging scheme.After tagging,all the statistics were imported to SPSS for further statistical analysis.Data analysis yielded the following findings:1.Overall,both similarities and differences existed between CEMW and EEWW in the use of stance markers.The two corpora were quite similar in terms of the overall pattern of distribution and the total amount of stance markers.In the use of the four categories,compared with EEWW,CEMW was found to underuse epistemic and attitudinal stance markers and overuse deontic and style-of-speaking stance markers.In the use of the subcategories of epistemic stance markers,no significant difference was found between the two corpora.As for the subcategories of attitudinal stance markers,affect markers were significanty underused in CEMW.2.The distribution of stance markers across three main sections(Introduction/Literature Review,Methodology and Results/Discussion/Conclusion;I/L,M and R/D/C for short)exhibited the same pattern between CEMW and EEWW.That is,stance markers were most frequently used in the R/D/C section,followed by the I/L section and the M section.3.In CEMW,the frequencies of stance marker was found significantly correlated with the theses scores.In-depth analysis further showed that among the categories and subcategories of stance marker,the frequencies of epistemic stance marker and its three subcategories were significantly correlated with the thesis scores.4.The higher-quality and lower-quality theses showed significant differences in the use of stance markers.Compared with the higher-quality theses,the lower-quality theses employed significantly fewer stance markers,especially in the use of epistemic stance markers.These findings confirm the important roles of stance markers in effective academic writing.First,the proper use of stance markers can be applied to fully express the writer’ss assessments and attitudes of the discourse.Besides,stance markers are to construct an interactive relationship between writers and readers and help them to maintain their face in interaction.Pedagogical implications are also put forward for learners and instructors of academic writing.First,learners should be sensitive to stance markers and try to apply them in academic writing.Second,instructors should assist learners in properly employing stance markers in academic writing.