On The Use Of Sentence Stems In Discussion Sections Of Linguistics Research Articles By Chinese And English Native Speakers

In recent years,with the advancement of metadiscourse research,sentence stem,a clause-level metadiscourse with prominent academic register characteristics,has received more and more attention.But at present there are few comparative studies on sentence stems in English academic writing between English native speakers and foreign English learners,especially on sentence stems in the discussion sections of research articles.Based on the self-built corpora of Chinese and foreign linguistic journals(30 articles each),through the comparative analysis of the frequency distribution of sentence stems,this study obtains the differences in the structural and functional distribution of sentence stems in the two corpora,so as to find out the preference and shortcomings of Chinese native speakers in using sentence stems in English academic writing compared with English native speakers.The results show that:(1)With regards to overall frequency distribution of sentence stems,Chinese native speakers use text-oriented sentence stems more frequently than do English native speakers,and the frequency of research-oriented sentence stems and participant-oriented sentence stems is lower than that of English native speakers;the overall frequency difference of the seven structures of sentence stems is not obvious;(2)From the perspective of research-oriented sentence stems,Chinese native speakers use procedural sentence stems and non-human subject structures too frequently,while the frequency of using conditional and topical sentence stems is low,and the use of sentence stems of the other six structures is also insufficient;(3)From the perspective of text-oriented sentence stems,the frequency of comparative,inferential,causative,referential and reporting sentence stems used by Chinese native speakers is low;(4)From the perspective of participant-oriented sentence stems,compared with English native speakers,Chinese native speakers use more stance sentence stems and fewer engagement sentence stems;Moreover,Chinese native speakers rarely use human subject structure to express their views and positions.These results reveal that Chinese native speakers show some deficiencies in using sentence stems in academic English writing,which is related to their non-native thinking pattern and writing style.To some extent,this study can help Chinese native speakers understand and use sentence stems with different structures and functions better in English academic discourse.The results also have some significance for the learning of sentence stems in academic discourse and academic English teaching.