A Comparative Study Of The Author's Stance In The Introduction Of English And Chinese Terminology

In recent years,more and more scholars and researchers seem to be aware of the fact that the publication of academic essays depends not only on showing their latest research findings but also on expressing their own point of view by promoting their academic stance.Under such background,abundant scholars have drawn attention on the study of authorial stance in academic discourse and fruitful studies have been done on the abstract and conclusion part of research articles.Few studies,however,have focused on the contrastive study of authorial stance in the introduction section.And contrastive studies of stance between Chinese and English research articles have rather been neglected.This study has selected the English and Chinese journals of applied linguistics as corpus to discuss the differences of authorial stance using between languages,which intends to provide guidance on the improvement of domestic scholars on their writing of English research articles and suggestions for their international publications on their language.Specifically,this study has applied Pho‘s revised model of Swale‘s move structure and Hyland‘s model of academic interaction as theoretical framework in order to better examine the move structure and authorial stance in academic discourse,while the introduction part of 60 Chinese and English journals are selected as corpus for the present study.We discussed the three moves in the introduction section,analyzed the distribution of authorial stance and its linguistic features in the moves ?establishing a territory‘,?establishing a niche‘ and ?presenting the present work‘ carefully,made a detailed contrastive study on the similarities and differences of authorial stance between languages,and analyzed the underlying reasons that may cause these differences.The major findings are concluded as follows:Firstly,Chinese and English articles have similar move structures,which are move 1 ?Establishing a territory‘,move 2 ?Establishing a niche‘,and move 3 ?Presenting the present work‘.In the first move,we identify step 1 ?Summarizing the existing study‘ and step 2 ?Drawing inference from the previous study‘ as obligatory steps for both languages,and the following four steps are optional steps.In move 2 ?Establishing a niche‘,Chinese and English are similar on the step 1 ?Indicating a gap step‘,which can be analyzed as an obligatory step.There are several differences in move 3 ?Presenting the present work‘,despite both languages start with the obligatory step ?Announcing present research descriptively‘.53% of the English introductions have raised their research questions in this move,while it only appears 10% in Chinese articles.40% of the English introductions have mentioned their thesis structure in introductions,while the Chinese authors rarely referred to this step.Secondly,authorial stances appear in each move and move 3 appears most frequently.The attitude markers appear most frequently in move 1,while the English has used nearly three times the amount of stance markers as much as Chinese.In move 2,boosters are used most frequently and sentence connectors such as ―however‖,―but‖ and negative words such as ―no‖,―less‖,―lack‖ are the markers of the move 2.In move 3,hedges and self-mention are the most frequently used authorial stance markers.International authors prefer to the reader-oriented hedges while Chinese authors tend to use the writer-oriented hedges.By using self-mention markers,international authors express their point of view more directly and hope to communicate with the readers and they use ―I‖ to mention themselves in order to show their confidence;while the communication between the Chinese author and the readers are more indirect and they won‘t use the singular first person pronoun so as to avoid the direct conflict with the reader.This study is significant in helping Chinese scholars and researchers on their international publications.Firstly,by comparing the stance in Chinese and English introductions,teachers of academic writing can make a better understanding of the similarities and differences of stance across languages,and they can provide constructive suggestions for students on their academic writing.Secondly,scholars can study the pattern of this thesis and study the stance on the other disciplines in order to publish their articles.Lastly,this study has summarized the stance using on the use of adjectives,first person pronouns and sentence structures.Chinese scholars can improve their academic writing level by drawing on the findings of the study.