| The past 30 years have witnessed rapidly increasing studies on academic writings written in English by non-native writers.The focus of these studies is mainly on the characteristics of generic structure,linguistic error and discourse organization in the writings involved.By contrast,the evaluative language in academic writings has not received as much attention as other characteristics.Given that evaluation covers the expression of both attitudinal and epistemic stances,the analysis of evaluative language is critical for the understanding of interpersonal relationship between writer and reader.To fill the gap of under-researched evaluation studies,this study attempts to conduct a contrastive analysis of evaluative language in conclusion sections of master theses written by both L1 Chinese and L1 English writers.Toward that goal,the study seeks to answer two core research questions:(1)How are evaluative lexical and grammatical resources distributed in conclusion sections of master theses of L1 Chinese and L1 English writers;(2)Are there any systematic similarities and differences in the patterns of evaluation which the two groups employ in conclusion sections of their theses.To address these three core questions,the study adopts both quantitative and qualitative analysis based on the self-built corpus.The corpus for this study consists of concluding sections of 36 theses written by L1 Chinese authors and 36 theses written by L1 English authors.Given the unclear boundary of evaluation identification,this study draws core elements from Biber's(2006)stance model,Martin and White's(2005)appraisal system and Flowerdew's(2003)signaling nouns to form a framework analyzing the use of evaluative language.The analytic framework clarifies two types of evaluative devices,including lexical resources(signaling nouns,affective adjectives,projection verbs and conjunctions)and grammatical resources(modal operators and complement clauses).Ant Conc is used to retrieve items under each category and total frequencies of those keywords and expressions are counted up.Drawing upon the final counts in the corpus,the study examines the use of six categories and their evaluative features in specific context.The major findings of this study fall into two parts.To start with,significant differences between two groups with regard to lexical devices can be observed.L1 Chinese writers underuse signaling nouns in comparison with their native counterparts,decreasing the density of information.And a narrow range of projection verbs,in particular,expansive verbs,is used by L1 Chinese,weakening the dialogues with readers.Taken together,L1 Chinese are not as capable of expanding lexical diversity and appropriately expressing uncertainty or assertiveness as L1 English.With respect to affective adjectives and evaluative conjunctions,no striking variation has been observed.Secondly,it is found that two groups perform differently at the use of grammatical evaluative resources.L1 Chinese overuse the modal can and should,indicating their lack of awareness in recognizing semantic meanings of modal verbs under specific contexts while L1 English show more reliance on the modal could and would.As for complement clauses,L1 Chinese dramatically use less evaluative that-clauses controlled by nouns,especially nouns from nominalized adjectives and verbs.These findings indicate that native speaker writers will construct new knowledge and persuade readers mostly through a tentative and objective presentation of their claims and,at the same time,avoid absolutizing or subjectivizing their statements. |
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