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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Motivations
Three considerations underlie the selection of the present study.Firstly, both lexical bundles and stance have been investigated by more and morelinguists from different perspectives, but relatively few attempts have been made tostudy the combination of these two, stance bundles.Multi-word sequences have been studied under many rubrics, including lexicalizedsentence stems (Pawley & Syder,1983), lexical phrases (Nattinger and DeCarrico,1992), formulaic sequences (Wray, 1999; 2000; 2002), lexical bundles (Biber etal.,1999), etc. This present study adopts the framework developed by Biber et al.(1999, 2004, 2006), thus the term lexical bundles will be used to refer to the specificlanguage phenomenon.Stance, for its heterogeneous and multifaceted nature, also has been investigatedunder several different labels, including evaluation (Huston & Tompson, 2000), affect(Ochs & Schieffelin, 1989), evidentiality (Chafe & Nichols, 1986), hedging (Hyland,1998), modality (Palmer, 2001; Halliday, 1994), etc. In the last decades, linguists havenot only been aware of the importance of formulaic expressions for they areimproving language processing and use, but also become increasingly interested in thelinguistic mechanisms used by speakers and writers to convey their personal feelingsand assessments. It is believed by the author that stance bundles which combine thefeatures of lexical bundles and stance, remain great vacancy for investigation anddiscussion.The second consideration relates to the spoken language which has attracted lessattention of linguistic researchers in comparison to written language. Relatively lessstudies describe the linguistic characteristics of stance bundles used by Chinesecollege English learners in spoken register than in written register. However,according to Biber et al.(2004)'s research, stance bundles are extremely common inspoken registers than in written ones. Sinclair (1991) argues that "the spoken form ofthe language is a better guide to the fundamental organization of the language than thewritten form, and there is no substitute for impromptu speech"(p.81). It has beenproposed that the spoken language should enjoy the same if not superior status as thewritten language. The fields of language teaching and testing have primarily beenconcerned with the investigation of the competence in oral communication which isbelieved to be far beyond the linguistic knowledge(Bachmann, 1990).
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1.2 Research objectives
First of all this study attempts to define stance bundles in order to establish aframework within which data analysis is conducted. And then a classification ofstance bundles is necessarily figured out for the closer investigation of thecharacteristics of stance bundles. This study uses corpus data from College LearnersSpoken English Corpus (COLSEC) in the examination of the use of stance bundles byChinese college English learners and takes the corpus data from British NationalCorpus (BNC) for Reference in order to make a comparison between Chinese collegeEnglish learners and native speakers. Questions that naturally arise are: To whatextent is the learners' use of stance bundles different from NS's? What are the possiblecauses of the difference? And what is the relationship between the use of stancebundles and the oral performance?
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