A Corpus-based Comparative Study On Stance Markers In Financial Discourse ——A Case Study Of Public Speeches Released By The Fed And PBOC

As an important role in participating in global financial affairs and presenting financial claims,financial discourse is valued more significant than before.Financial discourse is a linguistic activity carried out by people who work in finance and are paid to do so or influence the decision-making process of financial institutions,and it is an important tool for authors or speakers to express and articulate their views.In order to explore the tendency of stance in financial discourse,the author conducts a case study on stance markers in the public speeches delivered by the speakers of the Federal Reserve（Fed）and People’s Bank of China（PBOC）.Stance refers to speaker’s emotion,attitude and evaluation.On the occasion of speaking,as an important carrier of speaker’s stance,stance markers can be used as the criteria to judge if the speaker could express his own ideas and establish a good relationship with the audience.In China,the research on stance markers has shown an overall upward trend.So far,research on stance markers are mainly about its definitions and classifications from the theoretical aspect,and the research objects are mostly the distribution and frequencies of stance markers in graduates’ academic papers.In particular,the corpus-based comparative study on writings of Chinese and foreigners has become a hot research topic.Most of the research on stance markers at home and abroad are focused on paper writings,while rarely concentrate on financial discourse.Combining with the general classification of stance raised by Biber（1989）,and the further development of Hyland（2002）,as well as considering the modality emphasized by Biber ＆ Palmer in compensation for the insufficiency of early classification framework,the thesis proposed an adapted theoretical framework for the analysis.Stance markers were divided into four sub genres,which are epistemic markers,attitudinal markers,self-mention markers and deontic markers.Under each of them there are further branches,and the stance markers have a total number of 266.Based on the theoretical framework,the author built two corpora where data came from the official websites of the Fed and the PBOC.The data cover all the speeches of the Chairs Jerome Powell,Yi Gang and Guo Shuqing since they took positions in the office.Through the data observation and analysis,it can be found that except for deontic modality markers,the other three kinds of stance markers are more frequently used by the Fed.And in the specific use of each category,the Fed and the PBOC still show significant differences:（1）The Fed tends to use epistemic markers to indicate the next policy direction and describe the positive economic prospects.PBOC,on the other hand,emphasizes more on its own negative information and the inadequacy of current policies.Besides,Fed prefers to mark the source of information,which makes it more audience-oriented.（2）When using attitudinal stance markers to express personal feelings,Fed chooses words more strongly while PBOC tries to avoid using too many affective markers.（3）For the use of self-mention markers,PBOC generally avoids talking about self.However,both of them often use the first person plural to express their obligations and responsibilities.（4）As to deontic markers,PBOC pays more attention to logical necessity,while the Fed tends to use such markers to create obligations for the audience.