The Use Of Stance Nouns In Academic English Writing

As studies on academic writing go on,more and more scholars have begun exploring the evaluative feature and interpersonal function of academic writing from the perspective of stance.Stance in academic writing,expressing authorial attitudes,feelings,or judgments of the information in a proposition and embodying the interaction between writers and readers,helps writers persuade readers and cast their academic identities.Stance-taking is demanding for writers,as it not only involves a presentation of information,but also a reconciliation of conflicting demands for individual distinction and disciplinary conformity.Stance noun,the noun heading the N + that clause,N + to-infinitive,or N + of-preposition complement construction,is an important means of stance construction,for the choice of the noun enables writer to incorporate his/her stance.This thesis,adopting Biber's theory on stance,Hyland's theory on stance,and the stance noun categorization model of Jiang and Hyland(2015)as theoretical framework,contrastively explores the use of stance nouns in English academic writing from linguistic perspective,answering three questions:(1)What stance nouns are available in the English master theses written by Chinese EFL postgraduates and in the English articles in academic journals written by experienced writers?(2)What are the distributions of stance nouns in the English master theses written by Chinese EFL postgraduates and in the English articles in academic journals written by experienced writers in terms of general frequency,type,clausal pattern where stance nouns occur,and the ten most frequently used?(3)What are the features of stance constructed by stance nouns in the English master theses written by Chinese EFL postgraduates and in the English articles in academic journals written by experienced writers?This study takes a corpus-based quantitative method,building two corpora named English Master Theses Corpus(EMTC)and Articles in English Academic Journals Corpus(AEAJC)respectively.The findings of the thesis are as follows.On the one hand,there exist some similarities with the use of stance nouns in the two corpora.To be specific,seven categories of stance nouns are identified in both corpora,in which the Cognition stance noun occurs with the highest frequency,and the Discourse stance noun occurs least frequently;among the three stance noun complement constructions where stance noun occurs,the N + to-infinitive pattern takes the lead in frequency while the N + that clause pattern ranks last;way,fact and process are among the top ten most frequent stance nouns in both corpora;both Chinese EFL postgraduates and the writers of articles in journals construct more epistemic stance than attitudinal stance with stance nouns.On the other hand,the use of stance nouns in English master theses by Chinese EFL postgraduates displays some features.Specifically,the Chinese postgraduates obviously underuse Discourse stance noun in their English master theses,and the Status stance noun and Quality stance noun are used much less frequently by Chinese postgraduates than by writers of articles in journals;lower frequency and fewer types of stance nouns are used in master theses than in research articles in journals;there are far fewer cases of N + that clause pattern in master theses than in articles in academic journals;the Chinese postgraduates construct distinctively lower proportion of attitudinal stance with stance nouns than the writers of articles in journals do.The similarities above are attributed to the binding from the stylistic convention of academic writing,and the rhetorical practice and pattern of knowledge construction shared by members of the same discipline.The discrepancies found are attributed to the differences between Chinese EFL postgraduates and experienced writers in awareness of stance construction,command of disciplinary knowledge,vocabulary size,and experience of academic writing.Relevant suggestions for further study are listed as follows: First,further study on stance noun could adopt qualitative method or combined method so as to reveal the mechanism underlying the use of stance noun;second,further study on the use of stance noun in English academic writing could try diachronic perspective so as to yield some insights into the developing feature of stance construction.