A Comparative Study Of Stance Taking In The Conclusion Sections Between English And Chinese Research Articles

With the augmentation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary communication,the further construction of world-class university and the advancing of The Belt and Road Initiative,the appealing for pushing forward English for Academic and for Specific Purpose has been increasing in recent years.Research articles play an indispensable role in academic writing for the reasons that scholars can share their findings or academic ideas by means of publishing research articles and enable the community members to get the panorama of a specific research domain simply through reviewing research articles,and inspire other scholars to do further studies and enhance academic researches.Therefore,it is essential for scholars to get through the conclusion section of research article where the main findings or ideas and suggestions for further studies are portrayed to arouse scholars’ attention and interests and even find out the niche for ongoing researches.Based on genre analysis,critical genre analysis,functional approaches under the umbrella of socio-cultural theory,stance theory and lexical bundles theory,this thesis aims to examine the frequencies and distributions of general pattern of move structures in the conclusion sections of research articles in English and Chinese and to identify the similarities and distinctions of stance taking between English and Chinese research articles’ conclusion sections by corpus study.Factors leading to such kinds of similarities and distinctions are also discussed.The corpus consists of 24 journals of Applied Linguistics,Biology,Sociology and Mechanical Engineering selected from Social Sciences Citation Index and Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index with a time span of 20 years,from 1995 to 2015.Altogether,360 research articles’ conclusion sections are selected with a total number of words and characters of135394.The results show that(1)both in English and Chinese research articles’ conclusion sections,summarizing the study is the most frequent move pattern,with97.78% and 95.56% respectively,which can be classified as obligatory move;deductions from the research is the less frequent move pattern,with 48.89% and45.56% respectively,which can be put as optional move;while for the move of evaluating the study,there is great difference between English and Chinese,namely,it is nearly three times more in English with the percentage being 75% than that in Chinese with the percentage being 26.11%.(2)As for stance taking,both English and Chinese conclusions apply stance markers,pertaining to hedges,booster,attitude markers and self-mention,with more frequencies in English in general.As regards the distinctions between,the most frequent stance marker is self-mention in English,while attitude-marker appears to be the most frequent stance marker in Chinese.And the least frequent stance marker turns out to be attitude-marker for English and hedges for Chinese respectively.(3)When it comes to the lexical bundles,there are much more lexical bundles in English research articles’ conclusion to show stance,with nearly four hundred more in self-mention and hedges,three hundred more in booster and one hundred more in attitude-marker.These differences could be explained by cultural,disciplinary,institutional,social and historic factors.English writers tend to be more individual so that they use more stance markers and save the negative face of the readers in the meantime,while Chinese writers stress collectivism thus using less stance markers to maintain the positive face of the author at the same time.Furthermore,due to the disciplinary dissimilarity,soft science tends to illustrate and explain the phenomenon while hard science appears to display the process and result more objectively,so that soft science shows more explicitly the feature of stance taking than hard science.Finally,from the social and diachronic perspective,due to the increasingly competitive culture in academic writing and the enhancement of writers’ genre awareness of combining social communicative purposes with private intentions to promote himself/herself,the application of stance markers is high.Theses findings have implications for the studies of research articles conclusion writing.They will provide some perspectives for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies as well.