2.2 Stance Adverbs
2.2.1 Definitions of Stance Adverbs
Stance markers refer to English phrases comprising of one or more words such as “according to” and “significantly”, indicating the writer’s attitude or stance (Xu, 2011). Stance conveyed through lexical grammatical expressions have become increasingly important in writing (Biber et al. 1999). Stance markers can be identified through four typical parts-of-speech, including adverbials (such as “actually”, “according to”, and “significantly”), adjectives (such as “evident”, “possible”, and “pleasing”), verbs (such as “criticize”, “oppose”, and “emphasize”) and nouns (such as “comment”, “suspicion”, “importance”, and “failure”). Among many types of stance devices, adverbials especially stance adverbs, play a vital role in academic discourse that can be used to establish interpersonal relationships between writers and readers. The occurrence frequency of stance adverbs in stance expression is quite high, which are often employed to demonstrate how writers present their attitudes and judgements towards a proposition. Biber et al. (1999) found that stance adverbs are widely used in different genres, and single stance adverb is the most common used form of adverbial expressions in discourse. Stance adverbs can reveal the linguistic characteristics used to describe what is so called as “personal tasks”, which involves the author's personal attitudes, evaluations, and emotions (Biber et al. ,1999). Thus, stance adverbs can be defined as adverbs that can express the speaker or writer’s views or judgments in relation to the particular circumstances associated with the content of a clause.
Chapter 3 Methodology ........................ 17
3.1 Research Questions ............................. 17
3.2 HZAU CQPweb, a Web-based Corpus Platform ............................. 18
Chapter 4 Results and Discussion ................................ 23
4.1 Overall Distribution of Stance Adverbs in Two Corpora ................ 23
4.2 Three Categories of Stance Adverbs in LP corpus and JA corpus .. 26
Chapter 5 Conclusion ......................... 51
5.1 Major Findings ............................ 51
5.2 Implications ................................... 53
Chapter 4 Results and Discussion
4.1 Overall Distribution of Stance Adverbs in Two Corpora
Standard frequency (per million words) of epistemic stance adverbs, attitudinal stance adverbs, style stance adverbs was counted respectively and a contrastive analysis of three categories of stance adverbs is conducted as follows.
As shown in table 3, there is no significant difference (LL=0.91, P=0.088>0.05) in the overall occurrence frequency of stance adverbs between CNWs and ENWs, which demonstrates that CNWs have the intention and awareness to use SAs in their writings to express their attitude and stance. This finding is consistent with Zhao (2009)’s report that there is no significant difference in the use of stance adverbs between Chinese learners’ and English native writers’ research articles. However, distribution of three categories of stance adverbs is significantly different (table 3) (P<0.05), indicating that compared with ENWs, CNWs still have some problems with the use of certain categories of stance adverbs (either overuse or underuse of stance adverbs) in English agricultural paper writing (Lou & Yao, 2019). In terms of the proportion of three cate
