A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of Stance Construction Of English And Chinese Speech From Chinese And English College Students

In the past decade,English and Chinese teaching at home and abroad has continued to develop,and second language speech competitions have become an important way for second language learning,cultural dissemination and thinking cultivation.Through corpus,this study combined quantitative and qualitative research methods,and took Hyland’s stance marker from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics as the basic framework and compared the vocabulary and sentence stance construction of two authoritative speech competitions-"FLTRP·Guocai Cup" and "Chinese Bridge".The purpose was to explore the differences and similarities between Chinese and foreign college students in English and Chinese public speaking.The corpus includes Chinese and English:the Chinese,selected from"Chinese Bridge",including a total of 21817 characters;and the English,selected from the final of "Guocai Cup",with a total of 9621 words,both of which are selected from 2015-2021.The native language of the speakers of the Chinese corpus is English and the native language of the speakers of the English corpus is Chinese.It was found that the stance maker of the two speeches are correlated.In terms of lexicon,first,hedges are rarely used in both speeches;second,positive expressions and attitude markers are mainly used.And influenced by language characteristics and the contests purpose,there are significant differences in the use of boosters and attitude markers;the self-mention markers of the two speech contests preferred to use the first person,but influenced by factors such as mother tongue and culture,the high-frequency self-mention markers of the English speech contest is "we" and the Chinese speech contest is "I".In addition,the use of stance adjectives in the two speeches is slightly insufficient compared to other stance markers.In terms of sentence,both speeches prefer to express stance by affirmative statements,and introduce topics or draw the audience’s attention through interrogative sentences,and highlight or echo the theme with imperative sentences.Both speeches rarely use exclamatory sentences.In general,the stance construction of the two speech contests shows that the speakers have advanced level of their second language.The "Guocai Cup" speech competition stresses the cultivation of critical thinking,and the "Chinese Bridge" speech competition pays attention to the dissemination of language and culture,which are embodied in the speech.The result also shows that the mother tongue still has an influence.This study can provide reference for second language acquisition research and public speaking training in second language.