부산대학교 도서관

The purpose of this study is to investigate an attitudinal stance in online argumentative comments written by NS and NNS, and to analyze modal verbs as stance markers in NS and NNS writing. Two corpora for the corpus-based analysis were compiled to be compared. The NS commentaries were taken from the archive of an online news website and the NNS corpus was constructed from argumentative comments written by thirty-seven Korean graduate students in a university. All comments were analyzed for the presence of stance-taking and stance-support and identified as having an attitudinal stance if they contained a claim. The findings revealed that L2 writers could take their stance as much as the L1 writers did and assertion of personal opinion and fact were the most commonly used stance-support strategies in both corpora. It was also found that the modals of necessity/obligation were the most commonly used to express a stance and stance-support in the NNS comments while the modals were the least used in the NS comments. A discussion of these findings, their limitations, implications and suggestions for future research was presented.