A Contrastive Study Of Stance Markers In English Master Theses Written By Chinese And American Postgraduates

In academic writing, the author not only objectively reports research findings and conveys academic information, but also makes use of appropriate language resources to express his own opinions, attitudes, judgments, etc., which forms his stance. In recent years, the features and functions of authorial stance in academic discourse have been attracting more and more attention from researchers.The author of this thesis, based on the frameworks of stance put forward by Biber et al.(1999) and Hyland (2005), proposes the working definition and analysis framework of stance marker adopted in this study. The goals of this study are to explore the usage features and major lexical devices of stance markers in the results, discussion and conclusion parts of English master theses written by Chinese postgraduates, and to find out the similarities and differences compared with master theses written by American postgraduates. Two corpora of research texts are constructed by the author as needed, three semantic categories of stance markers—epistemic, attitudinal and relational stance markers are tagged manually in the corpora, and then the raw frequencies of each individual lexical item expressing stance is collected with the help of AntConc3.2.4w.The contrastive analysis of the results shows that there are similarities in the usage of stance markers in the two corpora. For example, stance markers commonly exist in the results, discussion and conclusion parts of master theses written by both Chinese and American authors; among the three semantic categories, the number of epistemic stance markers accounts for the largest percentages; and in the six lexical devices studied in this thesis, modal verbs are used with the highest frequencies. Besides those similarities, there are also significant differences identified between the two corpora. For instance, compared with their L1counterparts, Chinese postgraduates use hedging words with smaller frequencies and fewer types; the singular forms of relational stance markers I, my, me and markers expressing affect are used much less frequently in the L2corpus than in the L1corpus; Chinese postgraduates tend to use modal verbs can, will, should more often, while American postgraduates tend to use could, would, may which can convey more euphemistic and polite meanings.The difference in the vocabulary size and the proficiency to use words appropriately between the L2students and the native speakers, as well as the cultural difference between China and Western countries are all considered to be the major reasons of those differences in the usage features of stance markers in master theses.The findings of this thesis can provide some reference for the teaching and learning of academic writing. Teachers could include more contents on stance markers in the class of English academic writing, in order to help students enhance their awareness of the importance of effectively using language resources to express stance in academic discourse; at the same time, students could read more academic works to increase language input and to improve their academic writing ability.