A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Stance Adverbs In Academic Writing Of Chinese Writers And Native Writers

Stance is a very important aspect of language, as people are inevitably expressing their feelings, attitudes or value judgments when conveying propositional meanings. Many previous studies show that stance adverbial is one of the most common devices of conveying stance and stance adverb is the most common realization device of stance adverbial. There are studies conducted abroad to investigate the stance device of undergraduates. However, this kind of study is few at home and study on the stance devices in scholarly texts in China is far scarcer.Chinese academic English writing corpus and native academic English writing corpus are built for the research of this paper and the tokens of these two corpora are 373,790 and 528,040 separately. According to Xu Hongliang's classification of stance adverbs, corpus-driven approach is used to analysis the features of frequency distribution, clause position and collocational sequence of stance adverbs used in native writers and Chinese writers academic writing. This study finds that there are some differences of the use of stance adverbs in native and Chinese academic writing. The study shows that: 1) Both native writers and Chinese writers use epistemic stance adverbs most frequently, with the attitudinal stance adverbs the least frequently, and the style-of-speaking stance adverbs in between. However, native writers substantially more frequently use stance adverbs both in overall frequency and in subcategories frequency. Native writers use more varieties of stance adverbs than Chinese writers. Chinese writers underuse and overuse some stance adverbs and they are reliant on several stance adverbs. 2) As for the clausal position distribution of stance adverbs, both native writers and Chinese writers use clause-medial position most frequently, then the clause-initial position and last the clause-finial position. However, Chinese writers use the clause-initial position more frequently than native writers. As for the subcategory of style-of-speaking stance adverbs, native writers are more likely to use the clause-medial position whereas Chinese writers tend to use clause-initial position. Chinese writers cannot use the clausal positions of stance adverbs flexibly. 3) Chinese writers use fewer varieties of collocational sequences and misuse some collocational sequences. There are also some stylistically and pragmatically inappropriate uses in Chinese writers'academic writing.This study sheds some light on the foreign language teaching. First, the features of the use of stance adverbs in Chinese academic writing are revealed. This study enriches the research of academic English and can contribute to ESP and EAP teaching. Second, this study contributes to the second language teaching. English teaching should pay more attention to the collocational sequence of words and the related context meaning. If vocabulary teaching connects the syntactic, collocational sequence and context meaning of stance adverbs, it can help the English learners acquire and put out natural and appropriate English to show their stance.