| In the last twenty years, genre and genre analysis have become a hot topic in the field of linguistics. Genre analysis has been conducted in a number of fields, especially on research articles. However, abstract, as an important component of research articles, doesn't get much attention. There are limited genre analyses on abstract, and contrastive genre analyses are fewer. Having been editing the English abstracts for sci-tech theses published on the journal Experiment Science and Technology, the author has found that these abstracts are poorly written. In order to explore into abstract writing and provide some help for abstract writers, this thesis tries to conduct a comparative genre analysis on English abstracts for sci-tech theses, aiming at finding the difference between abstracts written by native speakers of English and those by Chinese writers, and also exploring the generic structure of abstracts for sci-tech theses.The study subject in this thesis is 60 English abstracts for sci-tech theses. Thirty abstracts written by Chinese authors are from six domestic core periodicals, and CC (Chinese Corpus) is used to designate the corpus of these abstracts. The other thirty written by native speakers of English are selected form Elsevier Science database, and NC (Native Corpus) is used to name this corpus. ESP (English for Specific Purposes) genre analysis is the way we conduct genre analysis on abstracts. To be specific, Bruce's (1983) four-move pattern of IMRD (Introduction, Method, Result, Discussion) is employed in identifying different moves. Swales'(1990) move-step model is used to analyze the microstructure of each move. Finally, some linguistic features such as verb tense, voice and first personal pronouns are also counted and analyzed.The main results from this study are: 1) abstracts written by native speakers are more complete in terms of structure, while Chinese writers tend to omit the move of Discussion. 2) Both Chinese and native authors attach much importance to the move of Introduction, Method and Result, for the three moves occur with high frequency in both corpora. 3) As to the microstructure of each move, there is no significant difference, but native authors adopt more steps in Introduction and Discussion than Chinese authors do. 4) Examination on linguistic features shows that tense and voice distribute differently in four moves to realize different communicative functions. First personal pronouns are rarely used in the two corpora, and if any, they are in the plural forms. Results show that native authors are more aware of the generic structure of abstracts, and their abstracts reflect a more complete structure. The difference may be attributed to native authors'proficiency in English and some cultural factors.Finally, based on the findings in this thesis, the author presents some pedagogic implications, especially on the teaching of writing sci-tech theses and abstracts. Teachers can adopt a genre-based teaching approach, which may help students better understand the structures, linguistic features in abstracts and improve their writing skills. This study may call attention to the standard format established by English academic community, help produce effective abstract writing and can improve cultural consciousness of academic writers. However, this thesis, aiming at sci-tech abstracts, and with only limited data, is only a tentative comparative study on the generic structure of abstract. It still leaves much for further researches with more data and in other disciplines. |
PDF Full Text Request