A Corpus-based Study On The Use Of Stance Adverbs In Chinese Learners' Academic Writing

Stance expressions are used widely in various kinds of registers,embodying interactive relations between the author and contents,among audiences.Stance expressions are an important communicative device to interact with others,which play an important role in academic writing,enable construct discourse evaluation and interaction,especially the voice and attitude of propositions in academic writing.Stance adverb is one of the most important devices,it can be classified into epistemic,attitude and style from the perspective of semantic category.However,this study finds that L2 learners still use stance adverb inappropriately,it mainly embodies L2 learners focus on using certain stance adverbs and lack diversity.From the above mentioned,based on MA(Master Articles)corpus and IJA(International Journal Articles)corpus,this study focuses on exploring the usage circumstances,which mainly studies their usage features of stance adverb through comparative analysis,the research questions of this study are as follows:(1)what are the distributional features of epistemic,attitudinal and style stance adverbs between MA and IJA_C?(2)Compared with international journal writers,what are the semantic features of stance adverbs in Chinese research articles?The following are specific procedures of research: Firstly,choosing corpus.This study based on Chinese English majors' corpora and corpus of International journal articles.Secondly,identifying research items;with the reference of Biber,et al.(1999)'s classification,this study is based on Chinese learners' MA thesis and international journal articles;Thirdly,according to Biber,et al.(1999)'s classification,with reference to listed items of Hyland & Milton(1997),which often appeared in academic English discourse,we will identify the investigated objects,in which contain some propositional phrases(the following we generally called stance adverbs).Then we use the software of Wordsmith5.0 to retrieve the concordance lines and calculate the raw frequency of each stance adverb in the two corpora;delete these words that do not have the meanings of stance adverbs artificially.Finally,using the statistical calculation device and Chi-square test(Liang,2010)to test their disparity the three categories stance adverbs in the both corpora through the frequency of occurrence,and then comparatively analyzing similarities and differences of high frequency of stance adverbs,which mainly investigate their patterns and pragmatic expressions according to specific contexts.Based on a comparative study of Chinese learners' MA thesis corpus and International Journal Corpus,this study examines learner's usage of stance adverbs and difficulty in expressing stance.It is found that the distribution of epistemic,attitude and style adverbs are similar in the two corpora,in view of the epistemic adverbs being most frequently used.The analysis of the high-frequency epistemic adverbs shows that learners tend to express higher degree of certainty,notably when expressing limitation;meantime,the restriction on the chosen words that they cannot be fully understand when expressing knowledge source and actuality.In English for academic purposes teaching,learners need to judge and express the degree of certainty appropriately and to fully understand the restrictions on the propositional contents on stance expression.These observed differences are attributable to the knowledge-knower structures characteristic of the stance adverbs.This study aims to investigate the usage features of stance adverbs from the perspective of semantic function,which could provide significance in English for academic purposes in academic teaching and writing to English as foreign language learners.The results show that L2 learners have similarities in using the three categories of stance adverbs compared with international journal articles,epistemic stance adverbs are the commonly used by Chinese learners and native speakers.Through analyzing high-frequency epistemic stance adverbs,L2 learners have significant differences in using limited several stance adverbs and the usage features.Using stance adverbs appropriately for learners in academic writing can strengthen persuasiveness in some senses.This study is of great significance and implications to academic writing and teaching.