A Comparative Study Of Stance Markers In Master Theses Written By Chinese And English-native Students

The expression of stances and attitudes is an extremely important research topic in linguistics at home and abroad.In the current context of increasingly frequent international academic exchanges,the ability to convey ideas through academic papers and to express the author’s stance and attitude in a reasonable manner is essential to researchers.Based on Hyland’s stance analysis framework,this paper builds two corpuses,the Chinese Native Master Thesis Corpus(CMT)and the English Native Master Thesis Corpus(EMT).In order to compare and analyze the use of stance markers in the master theses of Chinese and English-native students,this study focuses on the use of stance markers in academic discourse with the help of natural language processing methods.The study also examines the similarities and differences in the use of linguistic resources and sentimental attitudes of Chinese and English-native students,in order to provide reasonable suggestions for second language learners’ academic writing in English and provide a new dimension for the study of stance markers from the perspective of sentiment analysis.Based on two self-built corpuses,this paper compares and analyzes the use of stance markers in master theses written by Chinese and English-native students.In terms of the total number of stance markers,Chinese students use less hedges,attitude markers and self-mentions,but more boosters compared to English-native students.This indicates that Chinese students’ awareness of authorial stance making is presented relatively weak in their writing.The distribution of stance markers in each chapter shows that both Chinese and English-native students are able to use stance markers reasonably according to the communicative purposes of different chapters.From the characteristics of the use of each stance marker,we can indicate that compared with English-native students,Chinese students tend to express their stance more directly and clearly in their theses and emphasize the objectivity of their researches,while English-native students focus more on using linguistic resources to communicate with the readers and are more interactive.In terms of the sentimental characteristics of the two corpuses,both Chinese and English-native students’ full master theses are positive.For the perspective of different parts of the theses,positive sentiment also dominates in most parts of the theses with several parts negative.The results of sentiment analysis of sentences which contain stance markers reveal no significant difference between the CMT corpus and the EMT corpus in the distribution of positive,neutral and negative sentiment.The number of positive and neutral sentiment accounts for approximately80% of the overall number of sentiments in each part of the master theses.The distribution of sentiment is similar to that of the use frequency of stance markers.By comparing the similarities and differences in the use of stance markers and sentimental characteristics in Chinese and English-native students’ master theses,we can see different senses of interpersonal interaction in academic writings of Chinese and English-native students.Second language learners such as Chinese students need to learn about how to use appropriate linguistic strategies to communicate with their possible readers,and how to express their academic views properly within the constraints of academic writing regulations,and how to make their arguments more acceptable to the readers.While maintaining communication with the readers in academic writing,student authors need to reasonably convey their stance and attitudes in a scientific and objective way.