Abstract

Employing the model of evaluative that-clause classification by Hyland and Tse (2005), this paper conducts a contrastive study of evaluative that-clauses and its stance functions between Chinese master theses and journal articles. The frequencies, evaluative entities, stance, stance resources, and expressions were explored in two corpora of 320 abstracts from master theses and published research articles. Analysis results show similarities and significant difference between Chinese postgraduate writers and experienced writers. Statistics indicate that Chinese postgraduate writers tend to write with more attitude stance and general writing characteristics. The poor stance constructions of Chinese postgraduate writers are attributed primarily to insufficient consciousness of the linguistic convention of “target community”.

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