A Corpus-based Study On The Features Of The Use Of Stance Adverbs In Chinese MA Theses Of Linguistics

Stance refers to the way the author or the discourse participant expresses personal feelings,attitudes,assessments,evaluations and responsibilities to propositions.Using stance expressions can not only convey the information of the propositional content clearly,but also express the attitudes and the value judgments objectively,which is beneficial to persuade readers to accept the author's opinions.Therefore,the ability to express stance accurately and decently is an essential factor in the success of advanced academic writing.The present study builds on previous research,notably from Biber(2006),adopting a contrastive and corpus-based approach to study the features of the use of stance adverbs in Chinese MA theses of linguistics.Two small corpora are built,with the main corpus collecting 50 Chinese MA theses of linguistics(shortened as MA Corpus)and the reference corpus collecting 100 international journal articles of linguistics written by native American scholars(shortened as IJA Corpus).Comparison is made between Chinese MA theses of linguistics and international journal articles of linguistics from three aspects: frequency distribution,clausal position distribution and collocational sequence,and then the semantic features,pragmatic functions and discoursal effects behind the differences in frequency are explored.The research questions are as follows: 1)What are the frequency distribution,clausal position distribution and collocational sequence of stance adverbs in Chinese MA theses of linguistics? 2)What are the semantic features,pragmatic functions and discoursal effects of stance adverbs in Chinese MA theses of linguistics? 3)What are the differences in the use of stance adverbs between Chinese MA theses of linguistics writers and international journal article writers?The study shows that: 1)Chinese postgraduates use more stance adverbs in number while fewer types of stance adverbs than native experts do.Stance adverbs appear most frequently in the results and discussion part of theses,followed by the conclusion part in both corpora.As for the subcategories of stance adverbs,Chinese postgraduates obviously have a greater concentration of epistemic stance adverbs,showing inclination to guarantee the certainty,reliability or limitation of a proposition,but they rarely use attitude stance adverbs to express personal feelings or attitudes in order to ensure the objectivity of the academic writing;2)Stance adverbs occur more clausal-initially in Chinese MA theses,commonly separated from the rest of clause with a comma.The clausal-initial preference thematizes stance-taking,setting up concessive clause relations as well.3)Chinese postgraduates are inclined to use some fossilized collocations while native experts can use expressions diversely.As Chinese postgraduates are not good at utilizing a stance adverb to express different semantic meanings,stance adverbs are restricted in meaning in Chinese MA theses without mitigating the effect of stance-taking,which is remarkably different from native experts' uses.This study is of great reference and significance to academic English writing and English teaching.On the one hand,it helps English learners use stance adverbs to express their attitudes and standpoints properly in order to enhance the persuasiveness of academic English writing.On the other hand,the semantic and interpersonal functions of stance adverbs should be taken seriously in vocabulary teaching and learning.Therefore,the syntactic form,the collocational sequence and the contextual meaning of stance adverbs ought to be instructed systematically,which can help English learners output language more appropriately and naturally.