A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of Stance Markers In L1 And L2 Research Articles

This study was based on three corpora of Telecommunications research articles with approximate corpus size(approximately 460,000 tokens).These research articles were published in the International Telecommunications Journals written by the native English speakers(English L1 corpus),by Chinese writers(English L2 corpus),and research articles in English published in Chinese Telecommunications journals written by Chinese writers(Chinese L1 corpus).The lexico-grammatical features of the three corpora were all tagged by Biber’ Tagger.Based on the statistics,this study mainly compared and contrasted the frequency distributions and using characteristics of four categories(42 groups)of stance markers used by the three kinds of writers.The study found that: 1)In terms of the scope of use,except the likelihood adjectives+ that-clauses,certainty and affect adjectives+ to clauses,which were not used by English L2 and Chinese L1 writers,all the other 39 groups of stance markers were used.Among them,the English L1 writers use the most 18 groups,the Chinese L1 writers have 13 groups,and the English L2 writers only 2 groups;2)Chinese L1 writers produced more frequent modal or semi-modal verbs and its subcategory of possible modal or semi-modal verbs than English L2 writers who used more than English L1 writers;3)Though English L2 and Chinese L1 writers employed more frequently stance adverbs than English L1 writers,the variety of stance adverbs used by English L2 and Chinese L1 writers was less than English L1 writers.Some stance adverbs appeared less frequent than English L1 writers,such as typically;4)Chinese L1 writers utilized more that-complement clauses as stance markers than English L2 writers who used more than English L1 writers while English L1 writers produced more to-complement clauses as stance marker than Chinese L1 writers who yielded more than English L2 writers.However,English L1 writers used more that/to-complement clauses controlled by nouns than English L2 and Chinese L1 writers.These findings can provide important methodological implications for stance marker studies and pedagogical implications for stance-taking training or EAP teaching.