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

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.