本文是一篇英语论文，本研究基于COCA语料库，旨在探讨1990-2019年间学术英语及其人文学科和科技学科中立场副词的分布特征，并试图找出人文学科和科学技术学科的异同以及这两个学科中立场副词的功能。本研究对相关领域的学术写作和教学具有启示意义。
Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
Academic discourse, an integral part of academic research, has attracted much attention since the 1970s and has gained an important place in various research fields such as corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and sociology (Jiang & Zhao, 2006). Although the linguistic research on academic discourse started relatively late, it is multi-perspective and interdisciplinary, and the research results are equally rich. Due to the rise and rapid development of academic discourse research, issues in this field are systematically explored such as research on the application of hedges in academic discourse (Hyland, 1998c; Wang & Lv, 2016), the genre analysis of academic discourse (Zeng, 2005), and the phenomenon of academic discourse reporting (Lou, 2011). At the same time, research on stance markers in academic discourse gets increasingly popular in the field of applied linguistics. Academic discourse is not only the carrier for writers to express their thoughts and opinions but also has an important influence on writers’ establishment of academic status and the construction of world cognition. Therefore, academic discourse is significant for the success of academic researchers.
Traditionally, academic discourse is regarded as a reflection of objective and independent research facts and a relatively static display of academic achievements (Mauranen & Bondi, 2003). Academic language is therefore objective and static, avoiding the intervention of the author’s subjective feelings and attitudes. Furthermore, in the writing of academic papers, due to genre reasons, authors should follow certain academic norms to ensure the formality of their papers. However, the reliability of academic writings comes not only from the rationality of scientific discovery but also from the discourse persuasion of the authors’ argumentations (Jiang & Hyland, 2020). The data results are not self-evident but need to be presented to readers by authors in a convincing way with rationale language.
1.2 Research Questions
Based on Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the present study aims to explore distribution characteristics of stance adverbs in academic English and its two disciplines that are Humanities and Science/Technology (Sci/Tech) from 1990 to 2019, and find the similarities and differences between Humanities and Sci/Tech as well as the functions of stance adverbs used in these two disciplines. This study, therefore, intends to answer the following three research questions:
1) What are the characteristics of stance adverbs used in academic English and its two disciplines over the past 30 years?
2) What are the similarities and differences in the use of stance adverbs between Humanities and Sci/Tech?
3) What are the functions of stance adverbs used in Humanities and Sci/Tech?
The first question and second question need to be answered based on quantitative analysis, and the third one needs a qualitative analysis. The first question is mainly concerned with the diachronic changes of stance adverbs in the corpora over time, the second one focuses on the similarities and the differences of the use of stance adverbs between Humanities and Sci/Tech, and the third one centers on the functions of stance adverbs in a specific context, so as to see how the authorial stance of relevant disciplines is constructed.
Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Previous Studies on Stance
This section starts with the definitions of stance and then presents the concepts related to stance which will shed light on a better comprehension of “stance” discussed in the present study.
2.1.1 Definitions of stance
The definition of stance is an issue in the field of linguistics, scholars in the semantic and pragmatic circles have maintained a strong interest in stance. Numerous linguists (Biber & Finegan, 1988; Ochs, 1990) have made special research on stance, which provides a favorable reference for people to deeply understand this important language phenomenon. However, due to the differences in academic background, interest, and research perspectives of scholars, so far, the academic circles have not reached an agreement on the definition and connotation of stance.
The concept of “stance” is first put forward by Biber and Finegan (1988), Biber and Finegan (1988, p. 1) define stance as “overt expression of an author’s or speaker’s attitudes, judgments, or commitment concerning the message,” Biber and Finegan (1989) broaden their analysis to lexical and grammatical markers of stance, and define stance as the lexical and grammatical encoding of both evidentiality and affect (speakers’ emotions, feelings, and moods). Biber et al. (1999, p. 966) further supplement the indication of personal stance of the speaker or writer to express “personal feelings, attitudes, value judgments, or assessments.” Furthermore, according to Biber et al. (1999) and Conrad and Biber (2000), in addition to epistemic stance and attitudinal stance as put forward before, another notion under the concept of stance is added, namely, style stance. Biber (2006) also gives a description of stance, in his description, to express stance is to convey varieties of personal assessments and feelings, including attitudes about how a writer or speaker gets certain information, how certain he or she is about the veracity of the information, and what aspect the writer or speaker is talking.
2.2 Previous Studies on Stance Markers
Different scholars have different classifications of stance markers, which could be classified across semantic categories and word classes (Zhao et al., 2019). According to semantic categories, Biber & Conrad (2000) divide stance markers into epistemic stance, attitudinal stance, and style-of-speaking stance; Hyland (2005a) classifies stance markers into hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mention markers. According to the standard of word classes, stance markers can be divided into modals, lexical verbs, stance nouns, stance verbs, stance adjectives, and stance adverbs (Biber et al., 1999). This section introduces previous studies on stance markers across semantic categories and word classes.
2.2.1 Studies on stance markers across semantic categories
This part reviews previous research on stance markers across semantic categories, involving studies of a certain category of stance markers or studies comparing different semantic categories of stance markers, for example, the comparison between attitude markers and self-mention markers in a study.
Chapter Three Theoretical Framework and Methodology ........................ 21
3.1 Theoretical Framework of the Thesis .......................... 21
3.1.1 Classifications of stance adverbs ............................. 21
3.1.2 Model of stance adverbs ..................................... 22
Chapter Four Results and Discussion .............................. 33
4.1 Characteristics of Stance Adverbs over Time ............................... 33
4.1.1 Overall characteristics of stance adverbs ..................... 33
4.1.2 Characteristics of stance adverbs across disciplines ..................... 35
Chapter Five Conclusion ............................ 75
5.1 Major Findings .................................... 75
5.2 Implications ........................................ 78
Chapter Four Results and Discussion
4.1 Characteristics of Stance Adverbs over Time
This section focuses on the diachronic characteristics of stance adverbs and gives a description of the analyzed data from general to specific step by step. It gives the analysis of the research results from the perspectives of the general diachronic characteristics of stance adverbs to the specific diachronic characteristics of stance adverbs in the two disciplines, and then more specifically to the characteristics under each detailed classification of stance adverbs in the two disciplines, including the following three sections, overall characteristics of stance adverbs over time, characteristics of stance adverbs across disciplines over time, and characteristics of each category of stance adverbs across disciplines over time.
4.1.1 Overall characteristics of stance adverbs
To analyze the research data of the present study, the frequency of stance adverbs in this research needs to be normalized to the number per 10,000 words to ensure the accuracy of the results. In this procedure, the corpus sizes are needed. Table 4.1 presents the corpus sizes of the two disciplines in the three periods over the past 30 years. According to Table 4.1, we can see that the two corpora have similar sizes. The exact corpus size of Sci/Tech is 17,626,419 which is larger than that of Humanities with a corpus size of 16,363,484. For the sizes in each period of the two corpora, the corpus size of Humanities in the first decade is 5,767,451, the corpus size of Humanities in the second decade is 5,006,532, and that in the third decade is 5,589,501; the corpus size of Sci/Tech in the first decade is 6,215,838, the corpus size of Sci/Tech in the second decade is 5,698,892, and that in the third decade is 5,711,689. It can be seen from Table 4.1 that not only the total corpus size of the two disciplines is relatively evenly distributed, but also the corpus size of the two disciplines in each period is relatively evenly distributed. Specifically, the corpus sizes of the three periods of Sci/Tech are all slightly larger than that in the corresponding period of Humanities.
Chapter Five Conclusion
5.1 Major Findings
Based on the COCA corpus and Xu’s (2007) framework of stance adverbs, the present study explores distribution characteristics of stance adverbs in academic English and its two disciplines that are Humanities and Sci/Tech from 1990 to 2019, and investigates the similarities and differences between Humanities and Sci/Tech as well as the functions of stance adverbs used in these two disciplines. Findings of this study are summarized as follows, which are arranged according to the structure of the three research questions in the present study.
(1) Characteristics of Stance Adverbs over Time
The findings in this part are arranged according to overall characteristics of stance adverbs over time, characteristics of stance adverbs across disciplines over time, and characteristics of each category of stance adverbs across disciplines over time.
In terms of the overall characteristics of stance adverbs over time, the use of stance adverbs in academic English has decreased significantly in the past 30 years with a decreasing rate of raw frequencies reaching 27.82% and a decreasing rate of normalized frequencies reaching 23.46%, wherein the decline from the second decade to the third decade is more significant than that from the first decade to the second decade. The overall downward trend over the past 30 years shows that academic authors still tend to hide their identity instead of expressing their identity more overly in order to avoid taking responsibility for the accuracy of a proposition or conclusion.
As for the characteristics of stance adverbs across disciplines over time, the frequency of stance adverbs in both Humanities and Sci/Tech has also shown a decreasing trend in the past three decades, and the decrease rate in Sci/Tech is more obvious than that in Humanities. A reason for the decreasing use of stance adverbs in Humanities is the greater emphasis on more empirical methods and scientific data to support academic findings in this field, and the significant decline trend of using stance adverbs in Sci/Tech indicates that authors in this field are still prudent to express their overt stance and still rely on rigorous facts to achieve findings.
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