Analysis Of Stance Markers In The Moves Of English Dissertation Abstracts By Chinese And American PhD Students

Stance markers primarily refer to the linguistic devices employed by language users to express their personal attitude,evaluation or judgment towards propositions conveyed.With the increasing awareness of interpersonal meaning in discourse,researchers have become interested in the use of stance markers in academic writing.However,prior studies have mainly analyzed the whole text of journal articles in the discipline of applied linguistics.Few studies have examined the use of stance markers in students’ dissertation abstracts in hard sciences.Therefore,taking the discipline of materials science and engineering as an example,the present study investigates the specific use of stance markers in Chinese and American doctoral students’ English dissertation abstracts in combination with a move analysis of abstract.To achieve this objective,two corpora were constructed in this study,namely Corpus of Chinese Students’ Abstracts(CCSA)and Corpus of American Students’ Abstracts(CASA),each containing 56 English dissertation abstracts written respectively by Chinese and American PhD students in the field of materials science and engineering.The move structure of each abstract in both corpora was firstly identified and coded based on Santos’ s(1996)framework of move analysis.Subsequently,the occurrence of every type of stance markers in abstracts was retrieved by an online concordance software and then checked and coded manually according to Biber’s(2006)framework.Through statistical and textual analyses,the present study compared the use of stance markers in different moves of abstracts in the two corpora.Results reveal that the move structure of abstracts by the two groups of students is similar,but the completeness of information in the Chinese students’ abstracts is at a lower level.Specifically,they attach much importance to Situating the research(STR),but focus less on Presenting the research(PTR)and Discussing the research(DTR),which weakens the persuasiveness of their abstracts.Moreover,the two student groups have similar preference in the overall use of various types of stance markers in abstracts.Nevertheless,the Chinese students show a heavy reliance on modal verbs and stance verb + that-complement clauses to express stance,but underuse stance adverbs and stance verb + to-clauses.A comparative analysis on the distributions of various stance markers in the five moves of abstracts in the two corpora indicates that the students’ specific use of stance markers in different abstract moves is closely related to the different communicative purposes they intend to achieve in each move.Both student groups are more inclined to use stance markers in the DTR,Summarizing the findings(STF)and STR moves,and there are obvious differences in the students’ choice of stance markers in different abstract moves for different communicative purposes.Compared with their American counterparts,the Chinese students still need improvement in the use of stance markers in each abstract move since they tend to overuse or underuse some kinds of stance devices in different moves,which may influence the persuasive function of their abstracts.Based on an empirical study,this thesis suggests that a proper choice of stance markers in different moves of abstracts is effective in achieving the persuasive function of abstract.However,results indicate that the Chinese students’ move structure and use of stance markers in abstracts still need to be improved.The findings of the present study have practical and pedagogical implications for the teaching and learning of second language academic writing.