Comparison Of Move Structures And Stance Markers In English Abstracts Between Chinese And International Journals

Mastering English academic discourse is not limited to English vocabulary,syntax and morphology.It is also crucial to master the text structure,rhetorical strategies,and genre features of academic discourse.In the process of constructing academic discourse,grasping the proper way to construct discourse can flexibly help the authors to express her/his stance and viewpoint.Most researches have showed that for English L2(second language)scholars,there are still difficulties in using rhetorical techniques to construct authorial stance of academic discourse.Studies of stance markers in academic discourse mainly include research on stance markers used in research articles(Hyland,1996a;Stotesbury,2003;Hyland&Tse,2005;Yang,2016;Hyland&Jiang,2018),stance markers used by EFL(English as Foreign Language)learners(Hyland&Milton,1997;Hyland,2002a;Jiang,2015;Liu,20!5;Lee,2016;Geng&Wharton,2016;Leedham,2017),and contrastive research on stance markers between Chinese and international journals(Wu,2011;Xu,2011;Hou,2012;Pan,2012;Qian&Mu,2017).Taking the environmental engineering discipline for an example,the study firstly compares the differences of move structures between Chinese and international academic journals abstracts,and then conducts a comparative study of the use of stance markers between Chinese and international academic journals abstracts,aiming at exploring the distribution of stance markers and similarities and differences of stance markers between Chinese and international academic journals abstracts.The study combines the impact factor and expert evaluation to select 200 journal abstracts of environmental engineering discipline from the top 10 at home and abroad from 2013-2017,among which 100 journal abstracts are selected to build CAAC(Chinese Academic Abstract Corpus),and another 100 journal abstracts are chosen to build IAAC(International Academic Abstract Corpus),using Antconc to retrieve frequency of tagged words and SPSS 17.0 for statistical analysis.Through the move analysis,it is clear that the move structures in international journals tend to be more complete than that of Chinese journals from a macro perspective.From the microscopic point of view,Background move and Conclusion move are less frequently employed in the abstracts of Chinese journals.Moreover,Chinese journals seem to prefer PM embedded move,while international journals usually use MR embedded move.As for stance markers,the result shows stance markers are frequently used in the abstracts of international journals and Chinese journals,however,the general frequency of stance markers used in international journals is relatively higher than that of Chinese journals,indicating that English scholars are more active in promoting their stance than Chinese scholars.According the usage frequency of stance markers in the abstracts of international journals and Chinese journals,hedge is most widely used,followed by booster,self-mention and attitude marker.The results show that:From overall distributionof stance markers,there is a significant difference in the use of booster and self-mention between the s of international journals and Chinese journals;From distribution of subtypes of four stance markers,international journals use more commitment hedge,fact-asserting and certainty-indicating booster,affect and evaluation attitude marker,first person and third person self-mentions,while Chinese journals use more accuracy-oriented hedge.And the results show that authors mainly in abstracts construct the identity of prudent and negotiable researchers by hedge;reliable and confident researchers by booster;credible and authoritative researchers by self-mention;self-promotional researchers by attitude marker.By comparing the move structures and the usage of stance markers between abstracts of international and Chinese academic journals of environmental engineering discipline,this paper not only can make the Chinese scholars aware of their inadequacy in writing abstracts,but also can help Chinese scholars to better introduce their academic claim and attract readers in order to make Chinese journals more quickly approach international journal articles.