Chapter 2　Literature Review

According to Gary & Biber(2012),the expression of authorial stance varies along two parameters:the meaning of the assessment and the linguistic level used for the assessment.For the former,studies of authorial stance have been conducted from the interpretation of personal feelings in academic writing to the exploration of the status of knowledge in it.For the latter,the researches range from thorough researches of a single linguistic item to comprehensive descriptions of the general grammatical or lexical features.

Based on the previous researches,in this chapter,some related theoretical constructs of authorial stance will be reviewed on the one hand,considering personal feelings and assessments of certainty and doubt;and then a retrospective study on the previous researches in CMs will be conducted on the other.Authorial stance in academic discourse is such a wide-ranging subject area that different research approaches will adopt different criteria to judge what it is and will employ different terminologies to identify it.Section 2.1 reviews the main theoretical categories and constructs which are closely related to authorial stance in the previous researches before defining what this concept is in this current study.CMs are significant grammatical signals to express authorial stance but is lack of enough attention.Section 2.2 will review the major approaches to CMs from the perspective of traditional grammar,formal semantics,pragmatics,cognitive linguistics and SFL.Finally the chapter brings into vision the achievements and insufficiencies of the previous researches and points out the necessity of the current study.