A Study On The Use Of Stance Adverbs In English Major Postgraduates' Theses

In recent years,research on stance in academic writing has become increasingly abundant.The use of stance markers can effectively help writers express attitudes,emotions,and judgments about the meaning of propositions or other discourse participants.It is an important language strategy for constructing interpersonal meaning in discourse.Proper use of stance adverbs can improve the quality of academic writing and the credibility of the thesis.However,there is still a lack of research on stance adverbs used by dissertation writers,and some findings need to be confirmed by new data.Therefore,this study mainly discusses the use of stance adverbs in master's theses of English major.By self-built corpus,the author compares and analyzes 30 English master's degree dissertations and 40 academic articles published in international authoritative journals.The purpose is to investigate the use of stance adverbs in academic theses written by English major postgraduates with reference to the academic articles written by Englishnative-speaker scholars,and to explore the possible reasons for such similarities and differences,so as to provide some useful implications or suggestions for EAP teaching.1.What are the distribution characteristics of writer's epistemic,attitudinal,and style stance adverbs in English major master's theses? And compared with academic articles written by English-native-speaker experts or scholars,what are the similarities and differences?2.What are the features of writer's epistemic,attitudinal,and style stance adverbs in different chapters of English major master's theses? And compared with academic articles written by English-native-speaker experts or scholars,what are the similarities and differences?3.What factors may affect or restrict the use of stance adverbs for English major postgraduates in academic writing?The main findings of this study are: 1.Overall,although there occurs a large number of stance adverbs in two corpora,compared with English-native-speaker scholars,the frequency of stance adverbs used by English major postgraduate students is significantly lower,and there is a lack of diversity in using stance adverbs.2.In the introduction,methodology,results/discussion/conclusion chapters of academic writing,there is a descending trend in turn in the use of the epistemic,attitudinal and style stance adverbs in two corpora.3.Finally,postgraduates of English majors who are new to academic writing research do not know enough about the expressions of commonly used stance adverbs.Chinese and Western academic cultural traditions,different thinking habits,and the absence of academic writing guidance may be important factors affecting second language learners' acquisition of stance adverbs.This study explores and studies the use of stance adverbs in English master's dissertations,and provides reference for the academic writing teaching and academic articles writing and submission.However,this study only focuses on foreign linguistics and applied linguistics,and the amount of corpus is small,so it has some limitations.Then,researchers can further enrich the corpus in this field to comprehensively analyze and explore the characteristics of the use of stance adverbs in different disciplines.