A Corpus-Based Comparative Study Of Stance Construction In Academic Writings

Stance is an important aspect of discourse, as people are inevitably expressing their feelings, attitudes or value judgments when conveying propositional meanings. And these feelings, attitudes or value judgments are what referred as stance in this paper. It is a pragmatic relation between linguistic elements and context, between the author and the content or the audience. It is pervasive in any discourse at any time, and thus it is never a new thing. However, the surge of studying stance started in recent two decades and myriad of literatures on comparative stance studies have emerged, between genres/styles, between native-speakers and non-native speakers, and between different cultural backgrounds. For genres, academic discourse is the hottest topic in stance research in recent decades. As the characteristics of it was transformed from objectivity and informativity to subjectivity, interpersonality and argumentativity with people's perceptions, many scholars became interested in its research. And moreover, the stance construction in academic writing is quite difficult for language learners, therefore, the comparative studies between native speakers and non-native speakers or higher-proficiency holders and lower proficiency holders have become an important part in stance research. Scholars hope that this kind of research can provide some suggestions for L2 learning and teaching.This research has built two contrastive corpora, namely Professional Writers'Corpus (PWC) and Chinese Learners'Corpus (CLC), and made quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis of the usage of the major three categories of stance markers, namely modal auxiliaries, stance adverbials and stance complements, in these two corpora, in order to explore: 1) the characteristics of stance markers used in professional writers'articles; and 2) the similarities and differences of stance constructions between the Chinese learners'theses and the professional writers'articles. This research has mainly gained the following two results: 1) professional writers use these stance markers abundantly and richly, in order to serve the suitable accuracy, multi-voice in academic circle and the positive/negative faces of the author and the audience, etc.; 2) Chinese learners also use an abundance of stance markers, but in a smaller scale than the professional writers as a whole; on the other hand, they use modal auxiliaries remarkably more than the professional writers. It can be explained that Chinese learners tend to use more stance expressions probably due to the cultural factors butcan not use all categories of stance markers expertly limited by their English language proficiency, so they rely on the most familiar category, modal auxiliaries.Based on the results of this study, I proposed some suggestions for learning and teaching English academic writing in China. However, this paper has some limitations, such as the limited scale of corpus, source of texts, and coverage of stance markers. I hope improvements can be made in these aspects in future and more parties can join in this study in order to make greater contribution to English teaching in China.