大学生英语学术论文引言中情态模糊限制语修辞功能研究

The Use of Modal Verbs to Express Hedging in Undergraduate Academic Writing

本研究对比分析了中国英语学习者与英语本族语者在语言学英语学术论文引言中情态模糊限制语的使用异同。具体而言,本课题采用了基于语料库的语步分析对情态模糊限制语would,should和may进行分析研究。研究结果显示,情态模糊限制语与其所在的语步存在着相互策略关系。对比分析结果还指出本族语者与中国英语学习者都试图通过使用情态模糊限制语对他们英语学术论文中的语言进行修饰,以起到提高语言准确性、维护专家面子和自我保护的作用。但是,两组学习者对各语步中情态模糊限制语及其同现词列的选择却存在很大差异。

This study was conducted to analyse hedging modal verbs in undergraduate academic writing.Specifically,it was designed to investigate how the native English speaking（NS） students and the non-native English speaking（NNS） students express their hedging in their assignments by focusing on three hedging modal verbs：would,should,and may.The methodology used for the present research was a combined approach of methods from corpus linguistics and discourse analysis（specifically,move analysis）.The results of the topdown corpus-based move analysis showed that the different cooccurrence patterns of these three modal verbs have different hedging functions and have a tendency to occur at different move types to fulfill different communicative purposes.The analyses also indicated the existence of both similarities and differences between the NS and NNS groups in the use of hedging modal verbs in terms of both lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features in different contexts.