Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
In the process of communication, people inevitably express their attitude, feelings, judgments, emotions or evaluations to a proposition. Stance exists in all registers of text such as conversation, news, fiction and academic prose. Scholars have become increasingly interested in linguistic devices used by writers and speakers to convey their stance, assessments and feelings. Previously, relevant researches have been done under different label, such as evidentiality (Chafe, 1986), modality (Halliday, 1994), hedging (Hyland, 1998), appraisal (Martin, 2000) and evaluation (Hunston & Thompson, 2001). Biber et al. (1999) gave a comprehensive illustration about linguistic devices and categorizations of stance and stance markers, which paved the way for further studies. Chinese scholar Xu Hongliang (2007) found some research gaps which hadn’t been resolved and analyzed authorial stance markers in Chinese advanced English learners’ academic writing. Xu’s (2007) study started domestic researches on stance markers.
Stance can be expressed in various ways, including lexical and grammatical devices. Even non-verbal expressions like gestures or body language can convey meaning of stance. Lexical devices including nouns, verbs and adjectives are regarded as direct expressions of stance. The word itself carries the evaluative and affective meaning. Stance can also be embedded in certain grammatical structures. These structures include adverbials, complement clauses and prepositional phrases. Among all different grammatical devices which mark stance, stance adverb, which is a subcategory of stance adverbial, is one of the most common realization devices. Just as Biber’s (1999) study shows, single adverbs account for the highest percentage of stance adverbials and are commonly used in all registers. Beyond that, it is hard for non-native speakers to acquire adverbs (Hyland & Milton, 1997). The usage and position of adverbs in clause are flexible, there is great significance to explore how Chinese advanced English learners use adverbs to express their stance. Therefore, the present study would mainly focus on the use of single stance adverbs. The stance adverb in the present study is a grammatical device as well as a lexical device. The context of stance adverbs will be considered to reveal how adverbs can grammatically convey stance.
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1.2 Research Questions
The present study aims to investigate how Chinese advanced English learners position themselves and construct stance towards the propositions expressed by using adverbs, and to what extent they differ from native speakers of English.
This study focuses on the analysis of single adverbs. It deals with three aspects of the use of stance adverbs: the distribution of different categories, the lexico- grammatical features and the functions. The reasons are as follows. Firstly, different from other types of adverbs, the stance adverb is value-laden. It carries semantic meaning which convey the author’s attitude, judgment or feeling. It is important to analyze it from semantic perspective. Secondly, stance adverb in this study is viewed as a grammatical device as well as a lexical device, it is necessary to explore how a stance adverb grammatically express stance by analyzing its positions and collocations in a clause. Thirdly, the authors interact with the readers in the academic discourse, and they want their research findings to be accepted by others. Therefore, it is of great significance to find out the functions achieved by using stance adverbs. This study is going to discuss the following three questions.
(1) What is the distribution of different categories of stance adverbs in the conclusions of M.A. degree theses written by Chinese and Americans? (2) What are the lexico-grammatical features of stance adverbs used by Chinese and Americans in their M.A. degree theses conclusions? (3) What are the functions of stance adverbs used by Chinese and Americans?
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Previous Studies on Stance
In nearly all discourses, speakers or writers would consciously or subconsciously reveal their stance. Stance has many synonyms. In this section, the author will discuss definitions of stance given by previous researchers, and then list relevant concepts about stance.
2.1.1 Definitions of Stance
When we communicate with others, we unavoidably express our attitude, judgment, evaluation or comment to the content being discussed. The expression of stance has become a research focus. The term “stance” has been examined by different researchers. However, there is no unanimous definition of the term “stance”.
Biber and Finegan (1988, 1989) firstly define stance as “the lexical and grammatical expression of attitudes, feelings, judgments, or commitment concerning of the message, including the indication of the message.” This definition is concerned with the speaker’s degree of commitment to the truthfulness of the content. Biber and Finegan (1988) focus on the study of stance adverbials, including adverbs, prepositional phrases or adverbial clauses. In 1989, Biber and Finegan divert their attention to other markers of stance including modals and verbs indicating “opinion” and “perspective”. They also broaden their analysis on lexical and grammatical markers of stance and incorporate two concepts: evidentiality and affect.
Ochs (1990, 1996) tries to define stance from social and cultural perspectives. She regards stance as “a socially recognized disposition that includes both epistemic stance, a socially recognized way of knowing a proposition, such as direct and indirect knowledge, degrees of certainty and specificity. From affective stance: a socially recognized feeling, attitude, mood or degree of emotional intensity”(Ochs, 1990:2). In this sense, Ochs reveals a relationship between language and culture.
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2.2 Previous Studies on Stance Markers
Writers and speakers express their personal feelings, attitudes, value judgments or assessments through certain linguistic devices. These devices are called stance markers. Stance meaning can be expressed in various ways, including grammatical devices, word choice and paralinguistics devices. Paralinguistic devices include loudness, pitch, duration as well as non-linguistic devices such as gestures. Such kind of devices have nothing to do with written texts. Speakers or writers commonly use grammatical or lexical means to express their stance.
2.2.1 Lexical Marking of Stance
According to Biber et al. (1999: 968), affective or evaluative word choice involves only a single proposition, rather than a stance relative to some other propositions. With such value-laden words, the existence of a stance is inferred from the use of an evaluative lexical item, usually an adjective, main verb, or noun. In many instances, such expressions (e.g. happy, love) are used to directly attribute an emotional or attitudinal state to the speaker. Apart from that, lexical stance expressions simply assert that an evaluative property is true of the subject. For instance：
○1 The nurses are wonderful there.
The adjective wonderful is used to evaluate the nurses’ outlook. Many of the common-used English words are evaluative and can be used to express stance. Adjectives such as good, lovely, nice and right can express positive feelings; bad, terrible and disgusting can express negative emotion. Verbs can also express an emotion or attitude.
○2 I love the color of your dress.
In example○2 , the verb love expresses the subject’s affection. Such lexical expressions of stance are common in various registers including conversation, news or academic prose.
Reader’s ability is essential in recognizing the writer’s stance through the use of value-laden words. Stance is to some extent embedded in these structures (Biber et al., 1999).
英语语言学毕业论文怎么写
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Chapter Three Theoretical Foundation ........................... 193.1 Appraisal Theory ............................... 19
3.1.1 Attitude ...................................... 20
3.1.2 Engagement............................. 23
Chapter Four Methodology.................................. 27
4.1 Corpus Description ........................................... 27
4.2 Analyzing Tools .......................................... 28
4.3 Analyzing Framework .................................................. 29
Chapter Five Results and Discussion ............................. 34
5.1 Distribution of Stance Adverbs in CMTC and AMTC ................................ 34
5.1.1 Overall Frequency of Stance Adverbs in CMTC and AMTC ............ 34
5.1.2 Frequency of Each Category in CMTC and AMTC .......................... 35
Chapter Five Results and Discussion
5.1 Distribution of Stance Adverbs in CMTC and AMTC
In this part, the author will firstly compare the overall frequency of stance adverbs in CMTC and AMTC, and then describe the features of different categories of stance adverbs in the two corpora.
5.1.1 Overall Frequency of Stance Adverbs in CMTC and AMTC
The author got a list of all the adverbs appeared in the two corpora through automatic tagging and retrieving, then stance adverbs were picked in reference to Biber’s (1999) and Xu’s (2007) lists of stance adverbs. Since the word types and tokens vary in CMTC and AMTC, the author is going to discuss both of the two aspects of stance adverbs respectively. Moreover, the normalized frequency will be given to make a more accurate comparison.
First of all, it is necessary to see the lexical density of stance adverbs in the two corpora. The word types of stance adverbs in CMTC is 166, and the word tokens are 852; the word types of stance adverbs in AMTC are 183 and the word tokens are 894. The detailed information about the density of stance adverbs used in the two corpora can be seen from the following table.
英语语言学毕业论文参考
Chapter Six Conclusion
6.1 Major Findings
The present study explores the frequency, the lexico-grammatical features and the functions of stance adverbs in Chinese and American master thesis conclusions under the framework of Xu’s (2007) categorization of stance adverbs. The findings can be concluded as follows.
Firstly, in terms of the overall frequency of stance adverbs, Chinese English linguistics masters use more stance adverbs than American native speakers do, and there are significant difference in terms of the overall frequency of stance adverbs in the two corpora. On category level, among the three main categories (epistemic, attitudinal and style-of-speaking), both Chinese and American masters use epistemic stance adverbs most frequently, but Chinese use more style-of-speaking stance adverbs than attitudinal ones, while native speakers tend to use more attitudinal than style-of-speaking stance adverbs. If we go into detail and examine the subcategories of the three categories, we can find that in both CMTC and AMTC, the rankings of the distributions of hedging, evaluation, affect and evidentiality stance adverbs are similar. Among them, hedging stance adverb accounts for the largest proportion, while affect and evidentiality ones have the least proportion. The two corpora differ in that the ranking of style-of-speaking stance adverb in CMTC is higher than that in AMTC, while the ranking of certainty stance adverb in CMTC is lower than that in AMTC.
Secondly, the lexico-grammatical features of stance adverbs in CMTC and AMTC share great similarities. In terms of the clausal position of stance adverbs, the author finds that most stance adverbs occur in medial position, followed by initial position and then final position. Then the author explores the features of initial and final position stance adverbs and discovers that most initial position stance adverbs are style-of-speaking and hedging ones, while most final position stance adverbs are evaluation ones. As for collocational preference, the author takes four most frequently used stance adverbs (only, very, just and often) as cases and finds that the word classes of their top five collocates in CMTC and AMTC are similar. Chinese and Americans all have a preference to collocate stance adverbs with nouns, adjectives and prepositions. The differences of the lexico-grammatical features of stance adverbs in two corpora lie in that Chinese use more style-of-speaking but less hedging stance adverbs at the beginning of a clause than native speakers. Chinese also use more evaluation but no evidentiality stance adverbs in final position compared with Americans. Beyond that, contrast to Americans, Chinese tend to use adverbs and cardinal numbers to collocate with stance adverbs. The rankings of the collocability of certain word class with the chosen four stance adverbs are slightly different.
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