A Corpus-based Study On The Use Of Stance Lexical Bundles In Argumentative Essays By Chinese EFL Majors

The study of linguistic devices serving as stance expressions is one of the best means by which the relationship between the writer,the reader and the propositional meaning could be examined.Previous research on stance has mostly focused on single words such as ’I’ or single structures such as ’Noun+ that clause’.Plenty of literature has investigated the use of lexical bundles in different registers,varied disciplines,across different L1 backgrounds,and from different sections of writings,while few studies have narrowed the scope to the use of stance lexical bundles in written registers,especially undergraduate argumentative essays.Using a corpus-based quantitative approach,the present study builds on previous studies,aiming to investigate the distribution,structures,and functions of stance lexical bundles in Chinese EFL majors’ argumentative essays.Stance lexical bundles refer to those lexical bundles used to express the writer’s or the speaker’s attitude,assessment or argument on an issue or a proposition.The adapted structural and functional categories from Biber et al.(1999,2004)are used in the present study.Data in the present study consists of two corpora of student-produced argumentative essays:the observe corpus,consisting of 450 essays extracted from WECCL 1.0 and WECCL 2.0 written by Chinese undergraduate EFL majors,and the reference corpus,comprising 450 essays extracted from LOCNESS and NESSIEvl written by Ll-English speakers.The concordancing program AntConc 3.5.8 and Collocator 1.0 were used to find out all four-word lexical bundles in the two corpora.Also,some exclusion criteria adopted from Salazar(2014)were used to identify all useful four-word stance lexical bundles.In the statistical analysis,type/token ratio and log-likelihood value were performed to explore the varieties and significant differences of the use of stance lexical bundles between the two contrastive corpora.A quantitative analysis indicates that Chinese EFL majors use more stance lexical bundles but the usage lacks varieties compared with L1-English speakers.The two groups of writers do differ much in the use of structural and functional patterns of stance lexical bundles.Structurally,although they prefer to employ VP-based fragments to construct their stance,Chinese EFL majors tend to use more person pronoun/noun+VP fragment.However,L1-English speakers use anticipatory it+ verb phrase/adjective phrases mostly.Results also demonstrate that Chinese EFL majors use more personal certain,direct impersonal certain epistemic stance lexical bundles,and evaluation attitudinal/modality stance lexical bundles,while L1-English speakers tend to use personal uncertain,impersonal certain,hedged impersonal epistemic stance lexical bundles,and ability/possibility attitudinal stance lexical bundles.Finally,the present study concludes with some pedagogical implications for EFL argumentative writing.