7.1 Summary of the Findings
It is made clear in Chapter 1 that this study focuses on the illustrating how CMs could construe authorial stance rather than making the texts cohesive.Based on the theories of SFL,it focuses on the interpersonal domain of CMs rather than its experiential or textual functions.CMs in this dissertation refer to the explicit formal conjunctive resources forming expansive clause complexes.As to their lexicogrammatical realizations,the implicit conjunctive resources fall out of the focus of the current research.
Authorial stance in the current research refers to the epistemic and affective judgements and attitudes conveyed by the author in the authorreader interaction,which could fulfill or counter the reader’s expectation.The authors interact with the readers in that they present their opinions and makes assumptions about the state of knowledge of the audience and these can be reflected in the use of CMs.CMs in the EAPs such as furthermore,however,otherwise can be considered as signals from the writers to the readers by which the readers may either anticipate what happens next or work out the questions waiting to be answered.In this kind of interaction,the authors can construe their stances and align their readers.
The classification of the CMs are established according to the parameter of expectation(Hoey,2001;Hunston & Thompson,2000).It is natural for the CMs either to fulfill or counter the expectation.There are seven sub-types of CMFEs:the appositive,the clarificative,the causal,the spatio-temporal,the positive additive,the positive comparative and the positive conditional.CMCEs contains six types:the adversative,the negative additive,the varying,the concessive,the negative comparative and the negative conditional.
Based on this classification,the current research conducts a series of quantitative analysis of the types of CMs.Chapters 4,5 and 6 deals with the thorough statistic researches of CMs by explaining and by giving a disciplinary comparison and a comparison between AEs and ANEs.Table 7.1 summarizes the whole statistic information of types of CMs in N,S and H.
Table 7.1 Statistic information of types of CMs in N,S and H
Table 7.1 shows clearly the statistic information of types of CMs in different disciplines.These data present the following features:the CMs are the most frequently used(846.6)in H;S ranks the second(460.2),and in N the CMs are least frequently employed(349.9).Specifically,in the three disciplines,CMFEs are used more frequently than CMCEs,with the frequencies 311.9 vs 38.0 in N,371.5 vs 88.7 in S and 560.9 vs 303.7 in H.As to CMFEs,the authors in H use them most frequently(560.9),and its distribution in S ranks the second(371.5),while their frequencies in N are the least(311.9).The same situation also occurs in the distribution of CMCEs,with the frequency of 303.7,88.7 and 38.0 in H,S and N respectively.All of the above illustration could also be represented in Figure 7.1 below.
Figure 7.1 The comparison of CMs in three disciplines
It is observed that the authors in H use CMFEs and CMCEs most frequently,then S ranks the second and N usually ranks the last.It is determined by the nature of disciplines.The disciplines of H and S are considered as disciplines of“soft knowledge”(Hyland,2004),within which H is softer than S.CMs are important stance markers for the authors when they negotiate shifting certainties and opinions towards what they indicate.As discussed in Chapter 5,the discipline of N and the disciplines of S and H are different in their research methodologies,the contents,the author’s roles,the knowledge types and the writing demands,etc.These factors greatly influence the distribution of CMs in N,S and H.Table 7.2 presents the general information about the CMs in the AE EAPs and ANE EAPs.
Table 7.2 Statistic information of types of CMs in AE EAPs and ANE EAPs
In Table 7.2,it is found that AEs use CMs more frequently than ANEs(1055.9 vs 618.9).In specific,both of CMFEs and CMCEs in AE EAPs are more frequently distributed than those in ANE EAPs(779.4 vs 276.5 in AE EAPs and 464.9 vs 154 in ANE EAPs).The description can also be summarized in Figure 7.2 below.
Figure 7.2 Comparison of CMs and the subcategories in AE EAPs and ANE EAPs
Figure 7.2 indicates that the distribution of total CMs in AE EAPs are much more frequently used than those in ANE EAPs.Chapter 3 has mentioned that ANEs have to face their native culture and the target culture when writing the EAPs.They will find it more difficult to argue,discuss or evaluate competently as well as persuasively.They are linguistically and rhetorically less experienced than AEs when it comes to writing EAPs.So when they are writing,ANEs will work harder to use stance markers to express their attitude and judgement.When this phenomenon is mapped onto the use of CMs,it is easy to understand that ANEs employ CMs less frequently than AEs.
Furthermore,the study analyzes the distribution of the subcategories of the two types of CMs.For one thing,the authors in each discipline have their own preference for CMFEs and the distribution of specific type of CMFEs also presents many differences.For instance,H not only uses the appositive and clarificative CMs most frequently,but also most diversely.It is also noticeable that H has the most spatio-temporal CMs.Moreover,the corpora of H has the most positive comparative CMs,among which or accounts for the largest proportion of the total number of the positive comparative CMs in each discipline.Similarly,the conditionals in H account for the largest proportion.As to the CMCEs,it is noticeable that the CMCEs in H has the highest frequencies.Authors in H use CMCEs much more frequently than those in N and S.Being similar to the condition of CMFEs,there are also obvious differences in the frequencies of every sub-type of CMCEs.The favored types of CMCEs in three disciplines are similar:adversative and concessive.
For another,AEs not only use more CMFEs in EAPs but also explore more high-frequency types.That is to say,AEs use six times of positive additive CMs more than ANEs.Other obvious differences can be found in the comparison of the frequencies of clarificative CMs,causal CMs and positive comparative CMs.Specifically,among the six typical positive additional CMs in the chosen EAPs,the greatest linguistic difference lies in the distribution of and.The frequencies of clarificative CMs in AEs corpora are also much higher than those in ANEs corpora.In using causal CMs,AEs prefer to imply a proposition introduced by since and in that.Similarly,AE EAPs almost double the number of positive comparative CMs in ANE EAPs.
The above explanation focuses on the features of CMs and the subcategories in different disciplines and by the AEs and ANEs at the same time.In fact,Chapters 4,5 and 6 also analyze the distribution of the polysemous and with various semantic meanings.And is the most typical CM which could indicate additive,temporal,causal,and adversative relations.On the one hand,Section 5.3 summarizes the different distribution of and from the perspective of cross-disciplinary comparison.It is found that the four semantic types of and are dense in H and S but very sparse in N.Additive and is the most favored type while adversative and is the least in all three disciplines.On the other hand,the frequencies of CM and in AE EAPs are higher than those in the ANEs corpus.Specifically,ANEs do not incline to use adversative and in their writing.
All of the findings above about the features of the CMs could be summarized as follows.First,the authors in EAPs use CMs to make far more explicit connections for readers with little topic knowledge.In the chosen corpus,CMFEs are much more frequently used than CMCEs.It means that academic authors prefer to use the CMs which explicitly fulfill the expectedness.In this way the readers could be persuaded more directly and be aligned more quickly.
Second,the distribution of CMs is disciplinary specific.EAPs in H(in some cases it is S)contain the most CMs while N the least.This tendency tallies with the nature of disciplines.According to Hyland(2004:145),in the disciplines of N such as physics and biology,the community tends to downplay the role of individuals to imply that the results would be the same whoever produced them.So the interpersonal function of CMs is least represented in the discipline of N.As to the disciplines of H and S,in which the issues are more detached from the direct opinion and attitude of the authors,the distribution of CMs is correspondingly more frequent and more diverse.
Third,AEs generally use more CMs than ANEs.It is determined by their different writing conventions,roles of the authors and the readers,cultural shifts and rhetorical patterns,etc.ANEs are greatly influenced by their L1 language,which may be different from English in the writing conventions and rhetorical patterns.What’s more,they have to face two kinds of cultural shifts but the AEs only need to write in their own cultural conventions.Finally,ANE EAPs are reader-oriented and the authors avoid using as many interpersonal markers and show respect the the readers’knowledge.Therefore,it is not surprising that the distribution of CMs is less in ANE EAPs than in AE EAPs.