Contrastive Study Of Stance Bundles In English Research Articles Of Chinese And Foreign Applied Linguistics

Academic discourse is not only a demonstration of research findings, also a need of appropriate rhetorical strategies to persuade and influence readers. However, study of the stance bundles in research articles is relatively overlooked. The stance bundles are used for expressing writers' attitudes, personal feelings, value judgments, or evaluations. Based on Biber's framework and genre theory, the distribution and differences of stance bundles in research articles in the discipline of applied linguistics are explored between the English and Chinese writers. Then, a pragmatic study is made to analyze the underlying factors that contribute to their differences. The findings show that English expert writers make extensive use of the stance bundles, including 5 occur over 40 times/mw, 18 occur20 to 39 times/mw. They can be structurally divided into VP fragment, AP fragment, NP fragment and Anticipatory it fragment, and functionally categorized into epistemic and attitudinal/modality bundles. Contrastive analysis finds that advanced Chinese writers exploit most of the stance bundles, but there are differences in their frequencies.Generally, advanced Chinese writers are characterized by using less VP fragment, AP fragment and epistemic bundles than expert writers. Culture and face perception are the two main factors leading the different use of stance bundles by Chinese writers and English expert writers. These findings have implications for academic writing and teaching. An awareness of academic norms and rhetorical strategies is supportive for academic writing and communication under inter-cultural situations.