A Corpus-based Contrastive Analysis Of The Stance Markers Used By Chinese Learners And American Students

Language is an important tool in human's daily communication. We not only use language to transmit information and knowledge, but also rely on it to show our attitude, stance and emotional preference. In recent years, a plenty of overseas scholars have turned to their research on the evaluative language hidden in our language production, and as a result, they have put forward some influential theories and paradigms, such as stance markers, metadiscourse and appraisal theory.The present study adopts the framework offered by Biber and his colleagues in Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, and aims to find out whether there is a difference between the use of grammatical stance markers found in the argumentative essays written by Chinese college English learners and that found in the argumentative essays by American university students. Based on the analysis of the differences between Chinese students and American students, it attempts to offer some constructive suggestions for the teaching of English writing in Chinese universities.The Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) is chosen as the reference corpus in the study, and the argumentative essays in Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (2.0) (SWECCL) are used as the samples representing Chinese English learners in general. But only about half of them are selected as the data used in the research to ensure the comparability between the data collected from the two corpora. The principles of selection are that they must be untimed argumentative essays concerning social issues, and that they must be composed by university students.In order to specify the differences between Chinese English learners according to different competence levels, the corpus chosen from SWECCL is divided into four sub-corpora:non-English majors in Grade 1 and Grade 2 are labeled as Level 1, English majors in Grade 1 as Level 2, English majors in Grade 2 as Level 3, and English majors in Grade 3 and Grade 4 as Level 4.The results show that Chinese English learners demonstrate a similar tendency on the usage of grammatical stance markers to their American counterparts, but the frequencies are significantly different. Chinese English learners tend to overuse several primary modal verbs, degree adverbs of certainty, and adverbials, especially those adverbials related to the style of writing while American students tend to use less of these words, but use more that-clauses and to-clauses in general.As for Chinese English learners of different competence levels, in most cases, the students at higher levels tend to use grammatical stance markers in a more similar way to the American students.