A Study On Stance Meanings Of Mental Verbs In Chinese English Learners’ Oral Production

As an important tool for human communication, language is not only used to transmit information and knowledge, but also used to express people’s feelings, attitudes, value judgments or assessments on other people or things. In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of research on evaluative meanings or stance, especially on stance markers. And research on stance mainly focuses on grammatical devices, probing into distribution characteristics of stance markers in different registers.Combining Douglas Biber’s theory of stance with Susan Hunston&Gill Francis’s Pattern Grammar, the present research takes a corpus-based approach to investigate Chinese English learners’use of mental verb patterns to express stance meanings in the Spoken Test for English Majors (Brand Four). The patterns for the present study are mental verbs followed by that-clause and mental verbs followed by to-infinitive. The purposes of the present research are on one hand, to find out the distribution characteristics of mental verb patterns in Chinese English learners’ spoken English. And on the other hand, to investigate stance meanings addressed by the two mental verb patterns. Besides, differences and similarities in the use of the patterns and also stance meanings conveyed by the patterns between Chinese English learners and native speakers will be generated.The data selected for the present research generally consist of two parts. For Chinese English learners, they are from students who take the Spoken English Test, Brand4. Correspondingly, the reference native speakers’corpus is from the Great Britain part of the International Corpus of English.The results of the present research show that, in terms of patterns, generally speaking, Chinese English learners prefer to use mental verb+that-clause. And the same is true for native speakers. However, Chinese English learners tends to overuse some mental verbs like "think","know" and so on while underuse some others compared with native speakers. The frequency of mental verb+to-infinitive is also higher than that of native speakers. In terms of stance meanings, generally the pattern mental verb+that-clause is used to express epistemic stance while the other pattern mental verb+to-infinitive is preferred to address attitudinal stance. Meanwhile, the distribution of three kinds of stance is not balanced. By comparison, significant differences exist in both patterns and stance meanings which mainly shows in that the frequency of the two mental verb patterns are both higher than that of native speakers and Chinese English learners rely on one single pattern to address stance meanings.The present research investigates stance meaning from the perspective of Pattern Grammar, thus it bears both theoretical and pedagogical implications. Theoretically, the present research starts from mental verb patterns to investigate stance meanings expressed by these patterns. As a result, this research broadens the perspective to study stance meanings and also makes researchers reconsider the role that Pattern Grammar plays in language research.Pedagogically, the results of the present research have some implications for language teaching. First of all, as multi-word units, patterns are meaning carriers. In language teaching, teachers should focus on the input of word patterns to help students better express themselves. Second, more spoken materials should be presented to students, and teachers should create real-like spoken situations so as to encourage students to speak English and express themselves.