Corpus-Based Comparative Study Of Stance Markers In Chinese And American Official News

The Office of the U.S.Trade Representative(USTR)is responsible for developing and coordinating U.S.international trade,commodity,and direct investment policy,and overseeing negotiations with other countries.The Ministry of Commerce of China(MOFCOM)is the department in charge of domestic and foreign trade and international economic cooperation established by the People's Republic of China and is affiliated to the State Council of the People's Republic of China.Based on stance markers theory proposed by Hyland,the author makes a comparative study with the news in USTR and MOFCOM as research subjects.The author firstly establishes USTR corpus and MOFCOM corpus with a total number of 589789 tokens and 581849 tokens respectively,and then uses AntConc to calculate the frequency of stance markers for each category.Moreover,SPSS is used to test whether there is a significant difference in the use of stance markers in the two corpora,and a preliminary analysis of the reasons for these differences is made finally.It is found that the total frequency of stance markers used in USTR is higher than that in MOFCOM.In the classifications according to meaning,the frequencies of boosters in the two corpora show the most significant difference.In the classifications according to grammatical categories,the frequencies of verb stance markers reflect the greatest difference.The reasons are different in each classification.Overall,the differences are caused by the different thinking patterns of Chinese and American,the different inclination of words and expressions,as well as different characteristics of the news discourse.The results of this study are helpful to understand the use of stance markers in official news,to help understand the characteristics of news discourse,and to expand the research on stance markers in news reports.