Chapter 5 Conclusion
5.1 Major Findings Major findings of quantitative analysis are as follows.
In general, there is no significant difference in the use of stance adverbs between LP and JA corpus, but each category of stance adverbs is significantly less in LP corpus than in JA corpus. The percentage of three categories of stance adverbs in both corpora exhibits the same order, namely, epistemic stance adverbs > attitudinal stance adverbs> style stance adverbs. Hedging stance adverbs occupy the highest proportion (LP corpus: 64.80%; JA corpus: 68.95%) among all the subcategories of stance adverbs, thus they should be the target stance adverbs in teaching academic writing. Both CNWs and ENWs avoid using “ambiguously”, “ironically”, and “metaphorically”, which might be because these stance adverbs are not related to agricultural science.
In terms of epistemic stance adverbs, “significantly”, “highly”, and “relatively” in two corpora represent discipline-related features, thus they are highly frequently used. CNWs have the awareness to avoid using seemingly colloquial stance adverbs such as “often” and “simply”, but ENWs use these stance adverbs appropriately in their writings, indicating that CNWs might have misconceptions about these stance adverbs to some extent. Compared with ENWs, CNWs might lack confidence in their findings so they over-depend on some stance adverbs (such as “mainly” and “usually”) to intensify the tone of their statements so as to improve persuasiveness. CNWs employ the collocation “relatively highly” correctly in their writings whereas this collocation is absent from JA corpus, and the reason for this difference remains to be further investigated.
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