| In recent years,more and more people have realized that academic discourse is not a pure faceless discourse,but a communicative one in which a writer could project his or her position into texts and interact with the imaged readers.A large number of researchers have turned to “stance”,aiming to unlock the secret of academic writing in the communicative aspect through analyzing stance markers.Previous studies,however,either compared stance use of first language(L1)and second language(L2)learners or focused on certain discipline based on their own established corpus.Therefore,this research could be a good attempt to study stance markers across disciplines from the diachronic perspective based on Corpus of Contemporary American English(shortened as COCA hereafter in this thesis).Taking journal articles of History,Education,Sci/Tech and Medicine under Academic English in COCA from 1990 to 2017 as the investigated corpus,this research examined the use of stance markers among these four disciplines over the past 28 years based on the stance part of Hyland’s Interaction Model and intended to answer the following research questions:(1)What are the overall features of stance markers used in academic English and its four disciplines over the past 28 years?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the use of each element of stance across disciplines over the past 28 years?(3)What might the components of stance used across disciplines over the past 28 years reveal about stance construction in academic English?On the basis of quantitative and qualitative analysis,the major findings in this research are as follows:(1)As for the overall academic English,the use of stance markers has been in a continuous downward trend.To be specific,History and Education have generally declined their use of stance markers over the past 28 years,while Sci/Tech and Medicine have firstly witnessed a slight increase and then a dramatic drop in the use of stance markers.Meanwhile,History and Education have used far more stance markers than Sci/Tech and Medicine.(2)Regarding the similarities of stance use among these four disciplines over years,it showed that the most commonly used category of stance was hedges either across disciplines or time.And the most frequently used hedges were modal verbs,such as would,could,may and should.The main difference of stance use across disciplines lied in the use of self-mentions.History and Education have generally maintained a decline trend in the use of self-mentions,while Sci/Tech and Medicine have firstly increased and then reduced their use frequency.(3)In terms of the construction of stance in academic English,these academic writers commonly adopted modal verbs to tone down risky assertions in the aspect of evidentiality.History and Education have used more suggest that + clauses and reduced the use of think.About the use of appear,History and Education tended to use appear to – infinite which was directly after the subject,while Sci/Tech and Medicine preferred to add the modal verb may before appear to express their viewpoints cautiously.As for Affect,we found these academic writers all used far less emphatic expressions to avoid personal strong feelings.And they commonly used even and important to convey their attitudes and stress their viewpoints.Finally our analysis of presence showed that the high occurrences of we are resulted from the increasing pressure of academic writers and common collaborations in academia.And the high frequency use of I implies that academic writers have put more emphasis on personal contributions recent years.This research could extend stance studies in academic English,and also shed some light on how writers of the relevant academia have a better command and use of stance markers.Meanwhile,it provides enlightenment for the teaching of academic English for second language learners. |
