A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of Stance Nouns In Academic Spoken English

The use of discourse in academic texts is closely related to the author’s stance expression activities.The stance nouns in academic English mainly focus on the stance expression function of nouns,and have been receiving much attention in recent years.In order to explore the use of stance nouns in academic spoken discourse in different disciplines,the author collects transcripts of academic spoken discourses including soft and hard disciplines from the MICASE corpus as the research corpus.Combining with the classification framework of stance nouns put forward by Jiang & Hyland in 2015,the author studies from the complements of three structural forms of N+that,N+to-infinitive,and N+of-preposition to explore the similarities and differences in the use of stance nouns between soft and hard disciplines.According to the definition of stance nouns in Jiang & Hyland(2015),the author uses Ant Conc 3.5.7 to retrieve various stance nouns and the complement structures to explore the distribution of different stance nouns and structure expressions.The standardized frequency and P value are calculated using Loglikelihood and Chi-square Calculator 1.0 to test whether there are significant differences between soft and hard disciplines.The main findings of this study are as follows: On the whole,there are significant differences in the use of stance nouns between soft and hard disciplines.Soft disciplines use stance nouns more often to express their stance,especially in the Humanities and Arts.In terms of category selection,soft disciplines and hard disciplines have similar characteristics.The more frequently used stance nouns are Entity stance nouns and Attribute stance nouns.First of all,soft disciplines use more Entity stance nouns in academic oral interaction,and the frequency of using stance nouns in the Discourse and Cognitive subcategories is higher,which reflects they show a greater tendency to cite previous research experience to achieve stance communication in discourse and thinking through logical argumentation of long dialogues.Secondly,hard disciplines tend to judge entities and express appreciation or criticism directly in academic spoken discourse.Therefore,hard discipline scholars have the most prominent feature of high-frequency usage of Attribute stance nouns.Among them,Quality subcategory mainly appears in the experimental communication of hard disciplines,reflecting the real-time judgment of the experiment in the academic oral interaction.Status subcategory is not widely used in academic interaction because it involves modality judgments.It is noteworthy that Relation stance nouns are less frequently used in both soft and hard disciplines.In academic spoken discourse,for the consideration of context and audience,the speaker pays more attention to whether the current expression effect is realized,and then chooses a simpler and more intuitive way of stance construction.Finally,in the collocation of complement structures,soft and hard disciplines usually have different tendencies.Soft disciplines rely more on these three complement structures to achieve complex stance expression.N+that and N+of-preposition are used more frequently in the field of soft disciplines,which reflects the discipline characteristics of soft fields that focus on information supplement and language modification.N+to-infinitive is used at the lowest frequency.As evidenced by the large number of pauses before the complement structure in the soft and hard disciplines,it can be seen that the use of the complement structure has certain challenges in academic oral interaction,and requires better language application ability than written language.This study can provide some enlightenment for researchers on how to construct stances through stance nouns in academic spoken discourse,reinforce their focus on stance construction strategies under the characteristics of different disciplines,and make a certain contribution to the exchange of academic stances between disciplines.