Studies On Stance Markers In English Abstracts Of Articles In Domestic Foreign Language And Literature Journals

Academic articles are professional language genre governed by the norms of the professional disciplinary discourse community.In the process of academic writing,authors not only need to present their research results to readers,but also use a series of language devices to express their stance and opinions,negotiate with readers,and construct their identities,and the linguistic devices of expressing the author’s own attitude,opinion and evaluation of the proposition in academic discourse are stance markers.As very important linguistic devices,the use of accurate and appropriate stance markers helps the writer to present an appropriate and professional image to the reader,thus improving the overall quality of the article.In recent decades,a large number of studies have compared the use of stance markers in academic papers between different disciplines,between native speakers and ESL/EFL learners,between students and experts,and between qualitative and quantitative research articles.There are few studies of stance markers in foreign language and literature journals after differentiating their research fields.Based on Hyland’s(2005a)and Xu Fang’s(2015)framework for the study of stance markers,this thesis selects English abstracts of research articles from CSSCI journals in foreign language and literature.Depending on research fields,articles are classified into foreign literature,translation,theoretical linguistics,and applied linguistics,and 500 English abstracts of research articles in each research field are randomly chosen to construct sub-corpora.With corpus retrieval software,quantitative and qualitative analyses are conducted to study the usage and collocate of stance markers in English abstracts of journal articles by scholars from different research fields under the discipline of foreign language and literature.First of all,it was found that in terms of the overall frequency of stance markers used,scholars showed a pattern of most frequent use of hedges,then boosters,followed by attitude markers,and least use of self-mentions in English abstracts.After classifying stance markers according to word class,verbs and modals accounted for a relatively large proportion of hedges and boosters,but in attitude markers there are mainly adjectives and adverbs.Secondly,despite similarities of overall distribution patterns,scholars differ in their use of stance markers.English abstracts of theoretical linguistics use more stance markers,making the expression of stance more communicative and explanatory,while foreign literature research articles use less stance markers and tend to present the research content directly.This thesis further analyses and compares the high-frequency words under each word category in the four sub-corpora and finds that the linguistic devices used by the authors in constructing their identity are generally consistent,but there are still significant differences in the use and collocation of certain individual high-frequency words.For example,in the interpretation of research findings,the English abstracts of theoretical linguistics articles tend to use the pattern ‘it is/was found that’,whereas those of applied linguistics papers tend to use ‘results/findings show that’.This study expands the applicability of the theoretical framework of stance marker,enriches empirical studies on stance markers of academic writing to a certain extent,and sheds light on subsequent studies.On the other hand,this study can provide some reference for scholars in China to write English abstracts of academic articles and some inspiration for academic novices in academic English writing,and it can also provide some reference for teachers and instructors in the teaching process of academic English writing.