A Corpus-based Study Of Stance Adverbial Patterns In Political Text

Stance is a pragmatic relationship between linguistic element and the context, between the author and the content or the audience. It is pervasive in any discourse at any time, and thus it is never a new research topic. The surge of studying stance have started in recent decades and myriad of literatures on comparative stance studies have emerged, especially the comparative study between different genres, between native-speakers and non-native speakers, and between different cultural backgrounds. Language and politics always relate closely with each other. One linguist even comments"Politics is language and at the same time, language is politics."This close relationship is reflected in the political text. Political texts contain government deliberations, parliamentary debates, party programs, and speeches by politicians, etc. The present study is designed to investigate the marking of stance adverbials in original English political text and the translated English political text. Stance is an important aspect of language, as people are inevitably expressing their feelings, attitudes or value judgments when conveying propositional meanings. And these feelings, attitudes or value judgments are what referred to as stance in the present study. The central focus of the present study is on stance adverbials. Essentially on three questions: Firstly, what are the main characteristics of the marking of stance adverbials in English political text? Secondly, what are the main characteristics of the stance adverbials in translated English text? Thirdly, what are the differences and similarities between the two discourse types?In the present study, we carry out both a qualitative and a quantitative study on the two corpora of political discourses, an original English texts corpus and a translated English texts corpus. The stance adverbials in each corpus are examined from its distribution, clausal position, syntactic realizations and collocational patterns. The comparative study shows that there are several differences in the grammatically markings of stance adverbials in the two corpora.Though the present paper has its limitations, hopefully, it (the present study)can pave a way for the study of stance adverbials in political text, shed some light in the translation in this unique field, and also provide some useful reference for further research in this field in future.This paper is organized into 6 chapters. The first chapter is an introduction to the present study, including its main purpose and central focus. The second chapter will review the previous research in this area. The third chapter will focus on the theoretical framework of the present study, and we will describe the research methodology and data source of the present study. And in the fourth chapter, we present the empirical study of Original English Test and give a thorough qualitative and quantitative analysis. In the fifth chapter, comparative analysis will be conducted between the Translated English Text corpus and the Original English Test. The sixth chapter will draw a conclusion as well as some limitation of the present study.