A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Stance Adverbials In Chinese And US CSR Reports

Stance adverbial is a kind of grammatical device used by speakers or writers to express their personal feelings,assessments,attitudes,or judgments about the proposition.Corporate Social Responsibility Report is a kind of non-financial report that exposes a company’s social behavior,which falls in the category of Business English.This study compares the overall frequency,semantic features and functions of stance adverbials in Chinese Corporate Social Responsibility Reports(English version)and US Corporate Social Responsibility Reports both quantitatively and qualitatively on the basis of self-built corpora,aiming at exploring how these stance adverbials are used to make stances in both corpora.Findings indicate that the overall frequency of stance adverbials in both corpora is not high,but the frequency of stance adverbials in US Corporate Social Responsibility Reports is almost twice as high as that in Chinese Corporate Social Responsibility Reports.Epistemic stance adverbials are the most frequently used semantic category in both corpora.Moreover,there are significant differences in the frequency and choice of stance adverbials in each semantic category.Chinese writers tend to underuse certain stance adverbials such as nearly,approximately,primarily and overuse the stance adverbial mainly according to Chi-square Tests.Furthermore,the functions of stance adverbials in the two corpora are discussed and it can be revealed that the stance adverbials used in Corporate Social Responsibility Reports reflect enterprises’culture and value.A large amount of epistemic stance adverbials expressing imprecision are used in both corpora to avoid arbitrariness and show politeness so as to minimize the criticism from readers and maintain writer-reader relationships.This study will provide some reference for the exploration of stance adverbials in Business English texts.