Chapter 1　Introduction

Within the theoretical foundation of systemic functional linguistics(henceforth SFL),this dissertation attempts to explore how conjunctive markers(henceforth CMs)in English academic papers(henceforth EAPs)could help to construe authorial stance.

Traditionally speaking,EAPs are considered to be objective and impersonal in the sense that the authors should avoid expressing their personal comments or attitudes to ensure the scientific feature of the academic discourse.However,aiming to align the readers and persuade them to accept their arguments,the authors will more or less,explicitly or implicitly use various linguistic devices such as reporting verbs,adjectives,or personal pronouns to express their personal viewpoints.Comparatively,researches on CMs in this field receive very little attention since they are usually considered as the cohesive devices in the text.What’s more,although there are some researches on the markers expressing authorial stance with the comparison of academic discourse by authors in different disciplines or from different linguistic-cultural backgrounds(e.g.Hyland,2000;Lee,2006),there are very few researches in both of the two kinds of comparison at the same time.In order to make some contributions to this under-researched issue,this dissertation aims to look into the EAPs written by authors in different disciplines and from different linguistic-cultural backgrounds,so as to explore how various types of CMs could construe authorial stance.

In this dissertation,CMs are restricted to explicit formal conjunctive resources forming expansive clause complexes.There are various lexicogrammatical realizations of CMs such as conjunctions(e.g.,but,though),conjunctive adverbs(e.g.,in short,regardless),prepositional phrases(e.g.,by contrast,on the contrary)and numerals(e.g.,one,two).Section 1.3 will thoroughly introduce the criteria to choose the CMs analyzed in the current study.

To begin with,this chapter will successively specify the research background and rationale,outline the research objectives,introduce the data and methodology,explain the research significance and finally present the general content of the following chapters.