| Acnkowledgements | 第1-6页 |
| Abstract | 第6-8页 |
| 摘要 | 第8-11页 |
| A List of Tables | 第11-12页 |
| A List of Figures | 第12-13页 |
| Abbreviations | 第13-14页 |
| Chapter 1 Introduction | 第14-17页 |
| ·Background of the Research | 第14-15页 |
| ·Objectives and significance of the Research | 第15页 |
| ·Organization of the Thesis | 第15-17页 |
| Chapter 2 Literature review | 第17-30页 |
| ·Stance | 第17-22页 |
| ·Definitions of stance | 第17-18页 |
| ·Studies of stance under other labels | 第18-22页 |
| ·Stance adverbials | 第22-26页 |
| ·Semantic classification of stance adverbial | 第22-24页 |
| ·Grammatical realization of stance adverbials | 第24-25页 |
| ·Clause positions of stance adverbials | 第25-26页 |
| ·Previous Studies in this field | 第26-30页 |
| Chapter 3 Methodology | 第30-40页 |
| ·Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis(CIA) | 第30-31页 |
| ·Research questions | 第31-32页 |
| ·Instruments | 第32-35页 |
| ·Corpora employed in the study | 第32-34页 |
| ·Software employed in this study | 第34-35页 |
| ·Procedures of data analysis | 第35-38页 |
| ·Identifying the coverage of epistemic stance adverbials in the present study | 第35-37页 |
| ·Screening and counting the frequency of selected epistemic stance adverbials | 第37-38页 |
| ·Studying the distribution of the positions of epistemic stance adverbials | 第38页 |
| ·Interpreting the data | 第38-39页 |
| ·A summary | 第39-40页 |
| Chapter 4 Findings and Discussions | 第40-66页 |
| ·Overall Distributions of Epistemic stance adverbials across DHCEW and LOCNESS | 第40-46页 |
| ·Distribution of Epistemic stance adverbials across DHCEW and LOCNESS from the aspect of grammatical categories | 第41-44页 |
| ·Distribution of epistemic stance adverbials across DHCEW and LOCNESS focusing on semantic classification | 第44-46页 |
| ·Overall frequency of epistemic stance adverbials across DHCEW and LOCNESS and potential reasons | 第46-55页 |
| ·Frequency of Epistemic stance adverbials across DHCEW and LOCNESS | 第46-48页 |
| ·The potential reasons to the overuse and underuse | 第48-55页 |
| ·Comparison of the positions of epistemic stance adverbials across DHCEW and LOCNESS | 第55-66页 |
| ·The potential reasons to different positions | 第62-66页 |
| Chapter 5 Conclusions | 第66-70页 |
| ·Major findings of the study | 第66-67页 |
| ·Benefits to the study of epistemic stance adverbials | 第67页 |
| ·Implications to EFL teaching and learning in China | 第67-69页 |
| ·Limitations and suggestions for further studies | 第69-70页 |
| References | 第70-76页 |
| Appendix | 第76-79页 |
