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Investigating the use of stance markers in Egyptian and American MA theses: A corpus-based study
This is a corpus-based study that investigates the use of stance markers in MA theses written by Egyptian and American graduate students. It is a descriptive and exploratory study, utilizing a quantitative and qualitative design. A compiled corpus of 15 Egyptian theses was examined and compared to t...
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| Format: | Thesis |
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AUC Knowledge Fountain
2017
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| Summary: | This is a corpus-based study that investigates the use of stance markers in MA theses written by Egyptian and American graduate students. It is a descriptive and exploratory study, utilizing a quantitative and qualitative design. A compiled corpus of 15 Egyptian theses was examined and compared to that of 15 American theses in terms of the writers' use of stance markers. The study explored the use of self-mention through utilizing first person pronouns I, my, and me, and the more impersonal “it…that” structures and detected the patterns of the frequency and function of their use in both corpora. The findings of the study suggest that Egyptian thesis writers tend to be more distant and cautious in their writings. They prefer to employ more detached linguistic strategies to express their stance. This is illustrated in their avoidance of the use of first person pronouns and their high frequency of utilizing the impersonal “it…that” structures, passive constructions, and doubt adverbs. Another finding is that Egyptian thesis writers display a great deal of linguistic competence in utilizing “it…that” structures; however, they show a lack of variety in their choice of lexical items and syntactic structures in this stance feature. Differences in the use of stance markers in both corpora were highlighted and patterns of the “it…that” use, represented in The American Thesis Corpus (ATC), were listed in order to help Egyptian thesis writers voice their views in a more confident manner so as to gain acceptance in their disciplinary communities. |
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