A Corpus-based Diachronic Study Of Stance In English Academic Journals By Chinese Scholars Across Disciplines

Stance is the author's attitude,feelings,judgement,and assessment to the object and it plays an important role in English academic writing.Stance is usually expressed by stance markers.According to Hyland's interaction model,stance consists of hedges,boosters,attitude markers and self-mention.Previous domestic study mainly considered the stance markers of English natives or the comparison of stance markers between English natives and Chinese learners;however,there are few researches to study stance markers used by Chinese scholars in English academic journals.Thus,the author is to do a corpus-based diachronic study of stance in English academic journals by Chinese scholars across disciplines.In this research,the author built a corpus of four disciplines,corpus size is totally about 1,100,000 words,the disciplines include chemistry,computer science,anthropology and education,representing pure science,applied science,pure liberal art and applied liberal art respectively.In each discipline,the author selected 30 articles in 1999 and 30 articles in 2019,totally 240 articles.These articles are all collected from the English journals which are ranked by impact factors.In this research,the author uses the corpus tool AntConc 3.4.4 to analyze the data and tries to answer the following questions:(1)In recent 20 years,what are the overall features of Chinese scholars'stance markers?(2)In recent 20 years,what are the features of Chinese scholars' stancemarkers across disciplines?(3)In recent 20 years,what are the Chinese scholars' most frequentstance markers across disciplines?The first two research questions are at the macro level,while,the third research question is at the micro level.The third research question is to find what kinds of stance markers are used by Chinese scholars in academic writing,and if there are some regular differences in the choice of Chinese scholars among different disciplines.The results of the first research question show that,firstly,the overall normalized frequency basically has no significant change,but there are some differences among disciplines.Chinese scholars use more stance markers in soft science(education and anthropology)than in hard science(chemistry and computer science).From the trend of changing,compared to 20 years ago,stance markers used by Chinese scholars increase in applied science(computer science)and applied liberal art(education),decrease in pure science(chemistry)and pure liberal art(anthropology).From the types of stance markers,compared to 20 years ago,Chinese scholars use more hedges and fewer attitude markers.It shows that Chinese scholars are inclined to express their own stance in liberal art and applied disciplines,and Chinese scholars would like to use more hedges to express cautious attitude of stance.The results of the second research question show that in the usage of stance markers in disciplines,compared to 20 years ago,in pure science(chemistry),hedges increase,while boosters,attitude markers and self-mention all decrease;in applied science(computer science),applied liberal art(education)and pure liberal art(anthropology),hedges and attitude markers decrease,while boosters and self-mention increase.It shows that Chinese scholars highlight their position in applied disciplines and pure liberal art.They would like to use boosters to persuade readers to accept their own views.The results of the third question show that in recent 20 years,in hedges,most frequent words are modal verbs both in hard science and soft science,like should,may and would,the frequency of usage rises in pure science(chemistry)and applied liberal art(education)and reduces in applied science(computer science)and pure liberal art(anthropology);in boosters,most frequent words are epistemic verbs both in hard science and soft science,the frequency of usage reduces in pure science(chemistry)and rises in applied science(computer science),applied liberal art(education)and pure liberal art(anthropology).Chinese scholars prefer to use most frequent word show to express stance in hard science,while they prefer to use think to express stance in soft science;in attitude markers,most frequent words appear in value-based adjectives,like interesting,appropriate and important,and the frequency of usage reduces;in self-mention,most frequent words appear in the first-person pronoun structures both in hard science and soft science,the frequency of usage reduces in pure science(chemistry)and rises in applied science(computer science),applied liberal art(education)and pure liberal art(anthropology).The frequency of usage in soft science is more than that in hard science,and computer science shows obvious characteristics of soft science.In recent 20 years,frequent words used by Chinese scholars are attitude adverbs and value-based adjectives instead of verbs,and the members of these two types tend to be diversified.These findings show the features of Chinese scholars' stance markers in English academic journal in recent 20 years,and also demonstrate the features of Chinese scholars' stance markers across disciplines.This research enriches the study of Chinse scholars' stance;meanwhile,it provides enlightenment for the future teaching of academic English writing.