A Study Of The Use Of Stance Bundles And The Authorial Identity Construction In Literature Review Of English Majors' Master Theses

As a very important academic writing,academic paper is not a one-way process of knowledge dissemination,but a communication activity between readers and authors.Literature review is one of the most important parts of academic papers.In the process of writing,the author inevitably expresses his attitude,judgment or evaluation by the use of specific lexical bundles.That is to say,the author expresses his stance and identity through the use of stance bundles.This paper explores how authors construct identities by analyzing the use of some stance bundles in the literature review of master's theses for English majors in China.This paper analyses the use and distributional features of stance bundles based on Biber's stance system theory(1999),and analyse the authorial identity construction based on Ivanic's identity theory(1998).Through the study of epistemic,attitudinal and style of speaking stance bundles,as well as Ivanic's the discourse self and the authorial self,it intends to explore how the Chinese English-major postgraduate construct their identities in literature review part.This paper adopts the self-built corpus,taking Chinese English-major postgraduates' theses in Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics fields as research subjects.The writer randomly selected 40 Chinese English-major postgraduates' theses published from 2015 to 2018 in China National Knowledge Infrastructure,and then extract the literature review part.Antconc software is used to retrieve and make statistics,Simpson Vlach & Ellis(2000)'s the core and written stance bundles list is used as the reference.Quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis are combined to explore how the author constructs his identity with the stance bundles in the literature review.This study intends to answer the following three questions:(1)What stance bundles are used by Chinese English-major postgraduates in literature review?(2)What are the distributional features of the stance bundles in literature review of Chinese English-major postgraduates' theses?(3)What kind of identities do the writers of Chinese English-major postgraduates' theses construct by means of stance bundles?The findings show that firstly epistemic stance bundles,attitudinal stancebundles and style of speaking stance bundles all appear in literature review part of English-major postgraduates' theses in Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics fields.Epistemic stance bundles account for the largest proportion of 55.9%,attitudinal stance bundles rank the second,which occupy 40.2%,and the least is style of speaking bundles which make up 3.9%.Secondly,the author constructs authoritative,confident,prudent,credible and responsible identity in the literature review part to enhance the persuasiveness of academic papers.This study provides a new perspective for the study on authorial identity construction in the literature review part of the academic paper,and at the same time it is helpful for the teaching and writing of the literature review part in English academic paper.