A Contrastive Study Of The Marks Of Position Marks In The Referee 's Debate

Stance concerns the author’s attitudes, feelings, judgments, or commitment regarding to the proposition and stance markers are the linguistic realization of stance. This is the definition of stance by Biber. The object of this paper is court words, combining with Hyland’s model of interaction to describe stance markers’ in plaintiff‘s and defendant’s debate words in contrast. It aims to find out the characteristics of stance markers in both parties’ debate words and whether stance markers will influence the results.By describing and contrasting stance markers in plaintiff’s and defendant’s debate words, we find that there exist stance markers in both parties’ debate words and the four kinds, i.e. hedges, boosters, attitude markers and self-mention are all in used. The frequency of self-mention is the highest while the frequencies of attitude markers are the lowest. The frequencies of boosters are in the second rank which is higher than that of hedges. There are similarities and differences between plaintiff’s and defendant’s debate words. The similarities lie in that both parties are preferred to commitment hedges and certainty-indicating boosters. The frequency of first person singular self-mention is lower relatively because the opinions they express are more subjective. The differences lie in that plaintiffs prefer to use accuracy-oriented hedges and judgmental attitude markers while defendants like to choose emotive attitude markers. In plaintiffs’ debate words, the third person self-mention are occupied a lot and in defendants prefer to first person plural self-mention.The study shows that stance markers have impact on the results of cases. To the winning parties, they use more boosters in their debate words than that of hedges. Therefore, we advise that less hedges but more boosters are used to enhance the reliability of debate words. Besides, speakers should avoid using first person singular self-mention but increasing the third person self-mention. Since the opinion that the third person self-mention express are more objective and persuade.