Structures and Functions of Stance Nouns in Student Presentations

Stance has been identified as one of important aspects of discourse that enables speaker and writer to present his personal feelings and assessments. This expression could be realized through different linguistic structures. One of these structures is stance noun complement. This study intended to explore the structures and functions of stance nouns in native English student presentations. To this end, eleven student presentations were taken from MiCASE corpus and analyzed based on Hyland (2015) taxonomy of stance noun complements. To Hyland (2015), stance noun complement includes stance noun that takes a nominal complement clause in a form of that-clause, to-infinitive, and of-preposition. The results showed that the common noun complement clause was of-preposition. Moreover, the results indicated that to a large extent, stance nouns were used by students to functionally mark entities in the presentations. The results suggested that students do not prefer to present their stances concerning the relation between entities as they overlooked the relation function. The findings of this study could act as a good guide to students, especially EFL students, to plot their stances in the presentations.