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A Comparative Study on Stance Adverbs in Abstracts of Doctoral Dissertations by Chinese and Americans — A Case Study in Petroleum Engineering

Received: 23 February 2022    Accepted: 9 March 2022    Published: 15 March 2022
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Abstract

Stance adverbs are one of the main means to express the author's attitude and views on proposition information. This study bases on self-built corpus, taking the English abstracts of Chinese and American doctoral dissertations in the field of petroleum engineering as the corpus and analyzing the characteristics of stance adverbs used by Chinese and their American counterparts. The results show that: 1) there is no statistically significant difference in the overall frequency of stance adverbs between Chinese and American doctors, and both of them show a tendency of "epistemic stance adverbs > attitude stance adverbs > style-of-speaking stance adverbs"; 2) There is no significant difference in the frequency of using epistemic stance adverbs between Chinese and American doctors, but Chinese doctors significantly use more boosters, a subcategory of epistemic stance adverbs, showing the rigid traces of English writing style. Chinese doctors significantly use certain hedges, the other subcategory of stance adverbs; 3) There was no statistically significant difference in the frequency of using attitude stance adverbs between Chinese and American doctors, but Chinese doctors use more attitude stance adverbs to express affect than evaluation; 4) There is no significant difference in the frequency of style-of-speaking stance adverbs between them, and the fact that the use of this kind of stance adverbs is used least may be affected by the stylistic characteristics of the English abstract.

Published in International Journal of Language and Linguistics (Volume 10, Issue 2)
DOI 10.11648/j.ijll.20221002.15
Page(s) 95-102
Creative Commons

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited.

Copyright

Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Science Publishing Group

Keywords

Stance Adverbs, English Abstract, Petroleum Engineering, Epistemic, Attitude, Style-of-Speaking

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    Jiayu Bao. (2022). A Comparative Study on Stance Adverbs in Abstracts of Doctoral Dissertations by Chinese and Americans — A Case Study in Petroleum Engineering. International Journal of Language and Linguistics, 10(2), 95-102. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20221002.15

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    Jiayu Bao. A Comparative Study on Stance Adverbs in Abstracts of Doctoral Dissertations by Chinese and Americans — A Case Study in Petroleum Engineering. Int. J. Lang. Linguist. 2022, 10(2), 95-102. doi: 10.11648/j.ijll.20221002.15

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    AMA Style

    Jiayu Bao. A Comparative Study on Stance Adverbs in Abstracts of Doctoral Dissertations by Chinese and Americans — A Case Study in Petroleum Engineering. Int J Lang Linguist. 2022;10(2):95-102. doi: 10.11648/j.ijll.20221002.15

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  • @article{10.11648/j.ijll.20221002.15,
      author = {Jiayu Bao},
      title = {A Comparative Study on Stance Adverbs in Abstracts of Doctoral Dissertations by Chinese and Americans — A Case Study in Petroleum Engineering},
      journal = {International Journal of Language and Linguistics},
      volume = {10},
      number = {2},
      pages = {95-102},
      doi = {10.11648/j.ijll.20221002.15},
      url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20221002.15},
      eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ijll.20221002.15},
      abstract = {Stance adverbs are one of the main means to express the author's attitude and views on proposition information. This study bases on self-built corpus, taking the English abstracts of Chinese and American doctoral dissertations in the field of petroleum engineering as the corpus and analyzing the characteristics of stance adverbs used by Chinese and their American counterparts. The results show that: 1) there is no statistically significant difference in the overall frequency of stance adverbs between Chinese and American doctors, and both of them show a tendency of "epistemic stance adverbs > attitude stance adverbs > style-of-speaking stance adverbs"; 2) There is no significant difference in the frequency of using epistemic stance adverbs between Chinese and American doctors, but Chinese doctors significantly use more boosters, a subcategory of epistemic stance adverbs, showing the rigid traces of English writing style. Chinese doctors significantly use certain hedges, the other subcategory of stance adverbs; 3) There was no statistically significant difference in the frequency of using attitude stance adverbs between Chinese and American doctors, but Chinese doctors use more attitude stance adverbs to express affect than evaluation; 4) There is no significant difference in the frequency of style-of-speaking stance adverbs between them, and the fact that the use of this kind of stance adverbs is used least may be affected by the stylistic characteristics of the English abstract.},
     year = {2022}
    }
    

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    AU  - Jiayu Bao
    Y1  - 2022/03/15
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    N1  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20221002.15
    DO  - 10.11648/j.ijll.20221002.15
    T2  - International Journal of Language and Linguistics
    JF  - International Journal of Language and Linguistics
    JO  - International Journal of Language and Linguistics
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    UR  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20221002.15
    AB  - Stance adverbs are one of the main means to express the author's attitude and views on proposition information. This study bases on self-built corpus, taking the English abstracts of Chinese and American doctoral dissertations in the field of petroleum engineering as the corpus and analyzing the characteristics of stance adverbs used by Chinese and their American counterparts. The results show that: 1) there is no statistically significant difference in the overall frequency of stance adverbs between Chinese and American doctors, and both of them show a tendency of "epistemic stance adverbs > attitude stance adverbs > style-of-speaking stance adverbs"; 2) There is no significant difference in the frequency of using epistemic stance adverbs between Chinese and American doctors, but Chinese doctors significantly use more boosters, a subcategory of epistemic stance adverbs, showing the rigid traces of English writing style. Chinese doctors significantly use certain hedges, the other subcategory of stance adverbs; 3) There was no statistically significant difference in the frequency of using attitude stance adverbs between Chinese and American doctors, but Chinese doctors use more attitude stance adverbs to express affect than evaluation; 4) There is no significant difference in the frequency of style-of-speaking stance adverbs between them, and the fact that the use of this kind of stance adverbs is used least may be affected by the stylistic characteristics of the English abstract.
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Author Information
  • School of Foreign Languages, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu, China

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