A Corpus-Based Comparative Study On The Use Of Stance Adverbials In Academic Papers Between Chinese And Western Scholars

As an important means of writing academic papers,stance adverbials can convey the author’s views,attitudes,and value judgments on propositional information.Proper use of stance adverbials can help the author to communicate and interact with readers in academic thoughts,so as to gain recognition and acceptance from other members of the academic community.In view of the representativeness and universality of the corpus,this study adopts the corpus-based approach and Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis method and selects the subcorpora of physics,mathematics,linguistics,and sociology in the Beijing CARE corpus to form two corpora: Collection of Academic Research Essays of Chinese Scholars(CARE-C)and Collection of Academic Research Essays of Western Scholars(CARE-W),with 1,755,847 tokens and 3,786,471 tokens respectively.Ant Conc 3.5.8 and other research tools are employed to make a statistical analysis of the frequency and position of three categories of stance adverbials(Epistemic,Attitude,and Style;51 in total)proposed by Biber(2006b).In addition,the top ten high-frequency stance adverbials with significant differences(11 in total)from the two corpora are selected respectively to compare and analyze the collocation features used by Chinese and western scholars.The results show that: 1)The total frequency of stance adverbials used by Chinese scholars is less than that of western scholars.Among the three kinds of stance adverbials,attitude stance adverbials are the least used by both Chinese and western scholars,but Chinese scholars underuse epistemic stance adverbials and overuse style stance adverbials,and the vocabulary selection and quantity of stance adverbials are not as rich as those of western scholars,showing a preference of over-relying on certain words.2)In terms of the positions of stance adverbials,both Chinese and western scholars tend to use them in medial position,followed by the initial position,while rarely in final position.In addition,Chinese scholars use stance adverbials in initial position slightly more frequently than western scholars,and the syntactic position is not flexible enough.3)Both Chinese and western scholars have roughly the same collocation preference for the 11 high-frequency stance adverbials,preferring to combine stance adverbials with verbs,nouns,adjectives,negative adverbs and Wh-words;However,in some collocation sequences,the frequency of Chinese scholars’ use is obviously lower than that of western scholars,or even zero,such as Conjunction + Stance adverbials.Moreover,western scholars are more adept at using other grammatical devices such as modal verbs to assist in expressing stance.This study has certain reference value for the teaching of academic English writing as well as the learning of academic English writing by novices.In the teaching process,teachers should pay attention to guiding and training students to correctly express their stance.Meanwhile,students can also learn from the experience of high-level authors and choose appropriate stance adverbials according to their own writing purposes.