| Authorial stance is one of the crucial elements of social interactions in academic writing.Linguistic resources signaling authorial stance are called stance markers.Previous studies on stance markers have been made in the genre of academic discourse,mostly the English ones produced by native writers.Nevertheless,studies on stance-taking in research article abstracts from a comparative perspective,especially in English and Chinese abstract written by the same writer,have been rarely touched.Based on the interactional model proposed by Hyland(2005b),this study aims to explore the effect of cultural and linguistic variations on the use of stance markers assigned in abstracts.Firstly,it examines the differences(in total number and specific lexical choices)of stance markers employed in each rhetorical move in English abstracts published in Chinese journal articles with comparison to English journal article abstracts.Then it tries to figure out how stance markers exclusively occurring in English abstracts are realized in the corresponding Chinese abstracts written by the same domestic writers.In order to explore if there are any differences between the stance-taking across the different sets of abstracts,three corpora were built in this study which comprised of abstracts of empirical research articles in the discipline of Applied Linguistics,published in international and domestic journals from the year 2006 to 2016:(1)the CACJ corpus(i.e.,Chinese abstracts published in the Chinese journals);(2)the EACJ corpus(i.e.,English abstracts published in the Chinese journals);and(3)the EAEJ corpus(i.e.,English abstracts published in the English journals).Three research questions of this study raised are as follows: 1.What is the difference between distribution of stance markers used in the EACJ and EAEJ(sub)corpus? 2.What are the stance markers frequently as well as exclusively used in the EACJ compared with the EAEJ(sub)corpus? 3.To what extent is authorial stance-taking in the EACJ consistent with that of in the CACJ?Results show that the total number of stance markers,except for the category of boosters,is significantly larger in English abstracts published in international journals than those published in domestic journals.Moreover,the former groups include more stance markers than the latter ones do in each rhetorical move with significant difference identified.The use of four categories of stance markers in each move,except for boosters in STR moves and hedges in DTR moves,differs significantly between the two English corpora.In detail,the frequently-used stance markers in the two corpora are partly shared and the exclusively-used ones in each corpus differ in their lexical choice,with the EAEJ showing the greater lexical richness.Besides,varying degrees of consistency,with regard to stance markers exclusively employed in the English abstracts and their equivalents in the corresponding Chinese abstracts written by the same domestic writers,are identified in the rhetorical moves.Specifically,signaled by the attitude markers,information available in the sub-corpora of the CACJ varies greatly compared with other categories.In addition,information carried by the boosters is more likely to be retained than that by the hedges are.From this,this study may draw the conclusion that the domestic writers seem to pay more attention to conveying their authority and certainty of knowledge when dealing with the Chinese version.Features of academic cultural variations are apparent when domestic writers dealing with different versions of abstracts.Hopefully,the present study will provide some insights into the English academic abstract-writing for Chinese EFL writers. |
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