Comparative Study Of Stance Markers In Sino-British Energy White Paper

The external energy discourse system not only relates to the strengthening of our international energy discourse power and the shaping of our international image,but also relates to whether our country’s energy development can obtain a stable and harmonious external development environment.In recent years,more and more scholars at home and abroad have studied the stance markers in academic terms to explore the expression of the author’s stance and attitude toward an object.Stance markers are an important interpersonal communication strategy in academic articles.In the past,scholars primarily studied stance markers from the standpoint of academic discourse,while the studies of stance markers in other discourse genres were rarely mentioned.Therefore,from the perspective of energy discourse,this study selects the government energy discourse to conduct a comparative study of the stance markers in the energy white papers issued by the Chinese and British governments in recent years.This study uses the government energy white papers published between 2007 and 2020 as the source of the corpus,and builds two small corpora,Chinese Energy White Paper Corpus(CEWPC)and British Energy White Paper Corpus(BEWPC).Combing the classification of stance markers by predecessors and considering the genre particularity of the corpus in this study,this study will explore the use of epistemic,emotional,deontic and author appearance stance markers in the two corpora,and discuss and analyze the stance markers from the three subsidiaries of the stance triangle.The data analysis shows that the use of stance markers in CEWPC,both in terms of the number of uses and the diversity of words used,is much fewer than that of BEWC.Through further studies of the subcategories of the stance markers,we can see that the high-frequency stance terms in CEWPC show the Chinese government’s self-confidence and responsibility and its continuous pursuit of energy cooperation,which also coincides with China’s goal of building a community with a shared future.The use of high-frequency stance words in BEWPC highlights the UK’s achievements and strength,and the challenges and threats that the UK government is facing in the energy sector.This characteristics of the use of stance markers in BEWPC also reflects the feather that Westerners look at the world with a "binary opposite" mode of thinking.This study combines stance marker research with government energy discourse,provides more academic resources for the theoretical research of the stance markers,and provide some help for scholars to think and study the stance markers of energy discourse deeply.