English Department, North China Electric Power University, Baoding, Hebei, China.
PLoS One. 2021 Mar 8;16(3):e0247981. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0247981. eCollection 2021.
Stance markers are critical linguistic devices for writers to convey their personal attitudes, judgments or assessments about the proposition of certain messages. Following Hyland's framework of stance, this study investigated the distribution of stance markers in two different genres: medical research articles (medical RA) and newspaper opinion columns (newspaper OC). The corpus constructed for the investigation includes 52 medical research articles and 175 newspaper opinion articles, which were both written in English and published from January to April in 2020 with the topic focusing on COVID-19. The findings of this study demonstrated that the occurrences of stance markers in newspaper OC were far more frequent than those in medical RA, indicating the different conventions of these two genres. Despite the significant difference in the occurrences of stance markers between the two sub-corpora, similarities of the most frequent stance markers in two genres were also highlighted. The study indicated that the topic content seems to play an important role in shaping the way of how writers construct their stance. The lack of information or evidence on the topic of COVID-19 could restrain writers from making high degree of commitment to their claims, which make them adopt a more tentative stance to qualify their statements.
立场标记是作者传达个人态度、判断或评估某些信息主张的关键语言手段。本研究遵循 Hyland 的立场框架，考察了两种不同体裁（医学研究论文[医学 RA]和报纸评论专栏[报纸 OC]）中的立场标记分布。为了进行调查，构建了一个语料库，其中包括 52 篇医学研究论文和 175 篇报纸评论文章，这些论文均用英语撰写，发表于 2020 年 1 月至 4 月，主题均聚焦于 COVID-19。研究结果表明，报纸 OC 中立场标记的出现频率远高于医学 RA，这表明了这两种体裁的不同惯例。尽管两个子语料库中立场标记的出现频率存在显著差异，但两种体裁中最常出现的立场标记也有相似之处。研究表明，主题内容似乎在塑造作者构建立场的方式方面起着重要作用。由于 COVID-19 主题缺乏信息或证据，可能会限制作者对其主张的高度承诺，这使他们采取更为试探性的立场来限定自己的陈述。
