A Comparative Study Of Stance Markers In Research Articles Of Natural Science And Social Science

Stance markers, concerning writer-oriented features of interaction, are important devices to show writers' opinions, attitudes and commitments in academic writing. For the past few years, there have been a considerable number of cross-disciplinary studies on specific stance markers, such as hedges, boosters, attitude markers and self-mentions. However, comparative studies on overall stance markers in research articles of natural science and social science have received less attention.Drawing upon Hyland's model of interaction, the thesis made a comparative study of stance markers in research articles of natural science and social science. Fifteen single-authored research articles of natural science and eleven single-authored research articles of social science were selected from famous international journals to construct natural science corpus consisting of 79,233 words, as well as social science corpus with 79,838 words. After constructing corpora, the researcher tagged the target stance markers manually and calculated the frequency and proportion of each stance marker. By means of exploring the distribution of stance markers in research articles of natural science and social science, the study aims to explore the similarities and differences of stance markers in research articles of natural science and social science as well as the possible reasons.By quantitative analysis on the frequency of the overall stance markers as well as the proportion of each stance marker in the two corpora, the researcher found that: 1) in terms of similarities, the most frequently used stance markers in both corpora are the same: hedges; 2) as for differences, in general, writers of natural science use stance markers less frequently than those of social science; specifically, hedges, boosters and attitude markers are much more frequently used by writers of social science; however, self-mentions occur more frequently in research articles of natural science.By exploring the distribution of stance markers in research articles of natural science and social science, the present study found out the similarities and differences of using stance markers between natural science and social science writers. It is expected to enrich the research of interaction, and provide pedagogical suggestions for academic writing.