A Corpus-based Study Of The Lexical Behavior Of Stance Adverbs For Senior High School Students In English Writing

Stance is regarded as a way to convey the voice of the text;it can reflect speakers' attitude,opinion or comment on a proposition,and plays an important role in the construction of the whole text.The expression of stance is most frequently implemented or carried by stance adverbs.Current researches on stance adverbs primarily focus on academic discourses and political speeches both at home and abroad,and few studies have been made to analyze the features of stance adverbs in senior high school students' English writing within the frame of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis Framework.Therefore,this paper tries to analyze the lexical behavior of stance adverbs used by Chinese high school students by a corpus-based approach.This paper combines Biber and Xu Hongliang's classification of stance adverbs and regards them as the starting point.With BNC as a reference,it aims to compare the features of lexical frequency,lexical sequences,and pragmatic functions of stance adverbs employed by Chinese senior high school students and provide implications for the contemporary English teaching and research.The current thesis aims to address the following two questions:(1)Compared with native speakers,what are the general features of stance adverbs in frequency and lexical sequences of Chinese high school students' compositions?(2)Compared with native speakers,what are the pragmatic features of stance adverbs employed in Chinese high school students' compositions?The research results show that:(1)The total frequency of stance adverbs used by the students of Chinese high schools is lower than that of the native speakers.Among them,the normalized frequency of style-of-speaking stance adverbs is far lower than the native speakers'.And the normalized frequency of attitudinal stance adverbs is a little bit higher than that of native speakers,while stance adverbs that student employed are unitary and simplified.Among subcategories of stance adverbs,it is worth mentioning that Chinese high school students hardly use evidentiality stance adverbs to construct text.Almost all normalized frequency of subcategories of epistemic stance adverb used by English speakers are higher than those of Chinese students except indefinite frequency stance adverbs(SAs)and approximative stance adverbs(SAs).In addition,certain stance adverbs of epistemic-,attitudinal-and style-stance adverbs are overused and underused by Chinese high school students.When students of Chinese senior high school use stance adverbs to construct the whole texts,certain lexical sequences are misused and ignored.(2)When using stance adverbs to express commitment,Chinese high school students are basically in accord with native speakers.Compared with native speakers,Chinese high school students have not fully understood the pragmatic functions of stance adverbs yet.When using stance adverbs,Chinese high school students lack understandings of the interpersonal function and specific context function of stance adverbs,therefore the misuse or under-use appear frequently.In addition,the Chinese high school students lack the awareness of constructing the whole discourse by the use of stance adverbs because of inflexible and wrong position distribution,which thus affects understanding of whole text.The implications for English teaching and research are summarized as follows:(1)Theoretical implications:to a certain extent,this research analyzes and discusses the lexical behavior of stance adverbs used by senior high school students by the means of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis Framework,and enriches the corpus research of the stance expression.(2)Pedagogical implications:teachers should help students to understand and attach importance to stance expressions,and guide students to express their feelings or commitments in the real discourse correctly.In the aspect of language input,teachers should help students to establish the awareness of comprehensible input,and construct discourse with the diversified stance adverbs.In addition,English teaching should pay abundant attention to the lexical sequence of stance adverbs and its pragmatic functions,further match the form and functional meaning of stance adverbs closely.This will help English learners to produce more authentic and natural expressions.