A Contrastive Study Of Stance Bundles Used In English Research Articles By Chinese And English Native Scholars

Academic writing presents itself not only on the objective perspective,but also embodies an communicative efficacy with intended readers.It is the stance bundles that make it possible to achieve the interactive endeavors of writers in a certain scholarly field.Nevertheless,studies on stance bundles are not prolific,let alone a contrastive investigation on stance bundles in academic circles.Therefore,a contrastive study is conducted for the sake of seeking the underlying regulations and differences in using stance bundles between Chinese scholars and native English scholars by adopting a corpus-driven approach so as to provide enlightenment and reference for English academic writing and teaching in China.In this study,the author aims to find out the differences of stance bundles used in English research articles between Chinese scholars and native English scholars in the field of applied linguistics from three angles,namely,overall distribution frequency,functional category and statistically deviated shared stance bundles.Based on the categorizations drawn from Biber et al.and Simpson & Ellis,a subtle modification of functional classification of stance bundles is made as a theoretical framework to meet the need of the current study.By means of retrieving lexical bundles automatically and extracting stance bundles through manual checking from two self-compiled corpora(CSEC & NESC),the author is intended to find out the similarities and differences of stance bundles used in the two corpora so as to provide implications for improving our academic English writing in general and instruction of stance taking expressions in particular.The findings are shown as follows.(1)Chinese scholars tend to use more stance bundles than the native English counterparts.There are 102 stance bundles in Chinese scholar corpus in comparison with 79 in native English scholar corpus respectively.Chinese scholars prefer to use the stance bundles that are familiar to them,thus resulting in inappropriate use of stance bundles.There are 44 shared stance bundles,but there are also great differences in meaning expression in use of these stance bundles between Chinese scholars and native English scholars.(2)Functionally speaking,there are significant differences between the Chinese scholars and their English counterparts in the uses of epistemic stance bundles,evaluation stance bundles and intention stance bundles.Chinese scholars used more epistemic stance bundles(35%)than their counterparts(27%)while their counterparts used less evaluation stance bundles than the Chinese scholars(5% Versus 11%).Compared with native English scholars,Chinese scholars used more epistemic stance bundles and evaluation stance bundles than intention stance bundles.Chinese scholars and native English scholars are similar in the use of hedge stance bundles(19% Versus 22%).These figures show that Chinese scholars tend to use less forceful and less aggressive stance bundles in a proposition.In addition,Chinese scholars misused some stance bundles like “is consistent with” and they did not use the personal reference “we” combined with the intention stance bundles which often occurred in the native English scholar corpus..(3)There are total 44 stance bundles identified to be shared in CSEC and NESC,among which 12 stance bundles are used differently in CSEC and NESC.Chinese scholars overuse the stance bundle such as “according to the”,for it occurs in CSEC approximately four times more than that in NESC.When citing sources of information,native English scholars tend to appeal to several arguments of others in parenthesis instead of citing only one original information by such as “according to the”.Based upon the findings,we can conclude that stance bundles can serve as an important linguistic resources through which writers can voice their viewpoint with attitude and feelings as well as judgement.In order to be in line with conventional practice of using stance bundles in a certain research community,it is necessary to teach the regularities of how to use stance bundles in English academic writing explicitly in the classroom settings.