A Contrastive Study Of Stance Verbs Used In Argumentative Writings Of English Majors From NUC And TAMU

English argumentative writing plays a vital role in the study of English majors.In recent years,many literatures have studied the argumentative writing of students from different perspectives.Among them,the majority is from the angle of discourse,such as:coherence,interpretative structure,information structure.However,there are few studies from the perspective of stance.In particular,there is still a gap in the investigation,where essays of English major undergraduates were used as corpus to study stance verbs.This paper draws on the stance markers paradigm and classification proposed by D.Biber and colleagues,uses the theory and method of corpus linguistics research to make a comparative study of stance verbs used in argumentative writings of English majors from NUC and TAMU,observes how English majors of NUC use their stance verbs in writing English argumentative papers,and puts forward some feasible opinions and suggestions for the English majors' writing-teaching in NUC.Therefore,this study aims to answer two questions:1)What are the differences of stance verbs used in English majors' argumentative writings between NUC and TAMU?2)What factors influence English majors' selection of stance verbs in argumentative writings?In order to answer the above questions,the author collects the corpus and conducts research.The corpus are composed of 120 English majors' essays,the first corpus is a corpus of English majors in NUC,that is,an observation corpus,composed of 60 English essay writings from the sophomores of North University of China;the second corpus is a corpus of English majors in TAMU,which is a reference corpus.It consists of 60 essay writings from the sophomores of Texas A&M University.In order to ensure the comparability of corpus,the students used in this study are familiar with social issues.There is no limit to the writing time of English papers.The results show: Generally speaking,the stance verbs in English majors in NUCaccounted for 6.54% of the total number of words,and the stance verbs in students' argumentations from TAMU accounted for 4.59%.It shows that English majors have awareness of stance.Secondly,among different types of stance verbs,English learners of NUC tend to express their positions using modal verbs or semi-modal verbs and simple verbs,while students of TAMU tend to use verb phrases and clauses.About modal verbs and semi-modal verbs,English majors in NUC overuse “can,will,should”.About simple verbs,“think,know,and fell”,are more used and the verb “would,support,mean,seem” are underused.And they use fewer verb phrases than English majors in TAMU.From the perspective of semantic,there is difference between the two corpora.In English majors' writing of NUC,epistemic stance verbs mainly depend on complement clauses,followed by simple verbs and then on verb-phrases,while in students' argumentations of TAMU,epistemic stance verbs primarily on complement clauses,moderately on verb phrases and rarely on simple verbs.As for attitudinal stance verbs,simple verbs are the most used by English majors from NUC,however,students from TAMU often use complement clauses controlled by stance verbs.English majors in NUC frequently use verb-phrase to express their style of speaking stance,while English majors in TAMU often use complement clauses.From the result of questionnaire,it can be shown that English majors' attitude toward argumentative writing and knowledge about stance verbs will influence their selection of using stance verbs.According to the above research results,the author puts forward some suggestions for the teaching of essay writing for English majors.