A Corpus-based Study On The Use Of AFL Stance Bundles In Chinese And American MA Theses Of Applied Linguistics

It is widely acknowledged that stance bundles play an important role in writer-reader interaction in academic writing. However, studies on stance bundles in written discourse are limited, not to mention the comparative study on the use of a certain group of target stance bundles in Chinese and American MA theses of applied linguistics.This thesis, to some extent, has made a tentative study on the usage of stance bundles derived from The Academic Formulas List (AFL) (Simpson & Ellis,2010) between the American and Chinese MA theses writing based on Biber and his colleagues’(Biber et al.,1999,2004) theoretical framework from the perspectives of distribution frequencies, structural and functional characteristics, and the preferred means of taking stance. Aiming to seek out the gaps between these two groups of writing, the Chinese and American MA Theses of Applied Linguistics Corpus(CTLC and ATLC) with 50 theses each are complied. All the theses are finished during the academic year from 2001 to 2015. The results are drawn as follows:1) Almost every type of target bundles is distributed in both CTLC and ATLC, making a relatively high proportion in types, and also slight difference in normalized distributions. The individual distribution of AFL stance bundles shows that though both these two learner groups underuse or overuse certain kinds of bundles, the native learners seem to be more expert than Chinese learners. What’s more, Chinese learners use significantly less stance bundles in Result/discussion & conclusion part2) 49 and 54 bundles in AFL can be regarded as the most representative AFL stance bundles in CTLC and ATLC respectively. The analysis of the top 20 most representative AFL stance bundles shows that Chinese and native learners differ in use of stance bundles. Structurally, Chinese learners are more expert in the use of Passive verb+prepositional phrase fragment, and native learners are more expert in the use of (verb/adjective+) that-clause fragment, both in types and tokens. Functionally, Chinese learners are more apt to the use of ability/possibility stance bundles and native learners are more apt to the use of epistemic stance bundles, both in types and tokens.3) While taking stance, Chinese learners are more confident, and prefer to strengthen the assertiveness of major claim, while native learners tend to be more cautious and reasoning. What’s more, while hedging stance is needed, Chinese learners tend to be in a manner of speculation and generalization. Native learners, on the contrary, are more evidential and critical.The findings and conclusions in this study are also advisable for academic teaching and writing, which demonstrates the applicability and importance of AFL stance bundles in the field of applied linguistics and also the importance of appropriate level of stance taking and communication in academic writing.