The Use of Stance Markers in Chinese and International Journal Abstracts in Aerospace

Stance in academic discourse refers to the writer-oriented approach to interact with readers by commenting on the credibility of propositions, expressing their own attitudes or mentioning themselves. This study compares and analyzes the overall distribution and differences of the use of stance markers in Chinese and international journal abstracts. The corpus includes 200 journal abstracts from the both top 10 Chinese and international academic journals of aerospace discipline from 2018 to 2022. The results show that Chinese and international journal abstracts frequently use stance markers to express author’s attitudes and the following pattern appears in both journals according to the frequency of use, that is, epistemic stance markers> attitude markers > self-mention. Meanwhile, Chinese and international journals differ significantly in the use of approximators, shields, affect markers, first person self-mention and third person self-mention. International journals also seem to adopt more hedges than boosters, while Chinese journals adopt more boosters than hedges. A comparative analysis of stance markers could provide some reference for Chinese authors in writing academic abstracts.