A Corpus-Based Study Of Epistemic Stance Adverbials In Donghua University Students' English Wirtings

Stance marks the feeling, attitude, emotion, or judgment of speakers. Stance expressions can express those feelings and judgment, and can be classified into three subcategories, epistemic, attitude, and style. Epistemic stance expresses the precision, certainty and limitation of the proposition. The expression of stance can be realized by various grammatical means, and stance adverbials are the most popular one, and moreover, epistemic stance adverbial is the most popular one among the three subcategories mentioned above. However, a number of studies discovered that English learners, especially foreign English learners tend to overuse, underuse or use less flexibly compared with the native speakers. This study carries out a comprehensive contrastive analysis of the application of epistemic stance adverbials by Donghua Univeristy English majors in their argumentative writings and the native speakers by employing a corpus-based approach. Through the comparative analysis, the similarities and differences of the use of epistemic stance adverbials are explored. Based on the Donghua University corpus of English writings (DHCEW) and the English native writing corpus (LOCNESS), this study investigates the frequency and positions in the clauses of epistemic stance adverbials by employing Wordsmith 4.0 and SPSS 10.0. The results indicate that, there is significant difference on the use of epistemic stance adverbials between Donghua Unviersity English majors and the native speakers. Firstly, in general, Donghua Unviersity English majors underuse epistemic stance adverbials; secondly, there is difference on the frequency of each subcategory of epistemic stance adverbials between Donghua Unviersity English majors and the native speakers; thirdly, in the aspect of positions in clauses, significant difference also exist, with Donghua Unviersity English majors preferring to use them in the initial position, while the native speakers using them in the initial, pre-verbal, and post-verbal positions flexibly. This study also analyzes and explains according to certain linguistic theories, such as L1 transfer, insufficient input, training transfer, etc. The findings of this study will shed some light on the English teaching in Donghua University and are beneficial to a better study and flexible application of epistemic stance adverbials for English learners, and hence to improve their language competence.