A Contrastive Study On Cohesive Devices In English And Chinese Academic Paper Abstracts

With the increasing number of international academic exchanges, paper abstracthas become one of the most important media of academic communication. As a highlycondensed genre with strict norm, the discourse of academic paper abstract hasattracted increasing attention of various scholars in recent years. It is well recognizedthat academic paper abstract is not only an indispensable part of the paper but alsoprovides important information for readers. Previous studies on academic abstractsoften placed weight on the stylistic analysis of a unilateral (English or Chinese)abstract. However, there are still few contrastive researches on both English andChinese academic paper abstracts, and even less studies from the perspective ofdiscourse cohesion. Thus, based on the theory of cohesion and genre analysis, takingEnglish and Chinese academic paper abstracts as the research data, this study attemptsto conduct a contrastive analysis, aiming to reveal their similarities and differences inthe utilization of cohesive devices. Meanwhile, the study also intends to offer anelaborate and comparative description of generic features between the English PaperAbstract (EPA) and the Chinese Paper Abstract (CPA). Besides, the present studyaims to provide meaningful and enlightening implications for better understanding thegenre style and writing mode of academic abstract.As a discourse constituent in language system, cohesion serves the function ofclarifying meaning by connecting structurally unconnected constitutes. According tothe book Cohesion in English written jointly by Halliday and Hassan published in1976, cohesion consists of grammatical cohesion (reference, substitution, ellipsis,conjunction) and lexical cohesion. With the emergence and development of discourseanalysis, genre and genre analysis have aroused linguists’ attention. Genre analysisfocuses on the macrostructure of a text and its communicative function, which helpsto further elaborate the convention of language. It is believed that there are three mainschools of genre theory:(1) English for Specific Purposes (ESP),(2) Sydney school (3) New Rhetoric school. Based on the previous findings and theoretical framework,this study intends to carry out the research from two levels. On the level of cohesivedevices, with the help of the corporal software AntConc’s Concordance and Wordlistoptions, the quantitative and qualitative analysis are both conducted so as to have abetter analysis of the features of different cohesive devices. On the level of genericstructures, Bhatia’s move model and Hassan’ s generic structure potential (GSP)model(1985) are employed as the theoretical support to explore the move structureand generic structure potential of English and Chinese paper abstracts.Based on the theoretical framework of cohesion and genre analysis, a corpus of40samples of English and Chinese paper abstracts selected at random from the keyjournals during the year2000-2012is employed as the study data (including twentyEnglish academic paper abstracts and twenty Chinese academic paper abstracts, all ofwhich are abstracts of research articles in the field of English majors, such as Englishteaching, second language acquisition and so forth). The present research is toanalyze these40pieces of academic paper abstracts systematically mainly from theperspective of cohesive devices and generic structures.Through analysis and discussion, it is revealed that the application of both thecohesive devices and generic structures between the EPA and CPA share somecommon features. However, there do exist some differences:(1) More references areused in English paper abstracts，especially the personal references and demonstrativereferences.(2) The frequency of substitution appeared in Chinese paper abstract ishigher than that of English paper abstract.(3) In terms of conjunction, there are moreconjunctions in English paper abstracts，especially additives.(4) For lexical cohesion,it is found out that the frequency of repetition application is higher in Chinese thanthat in English which prefer to use references.(5) As for the generic structures,although English and Chinese paper abstracts are consistent generally,, there are somevariations in occurrence frequency for different moves.It is evident that the present study has in a sense deepened the understanding ofcohesion theory and genre analysis theory. Furthermore, this research has enriched theapplication and practice of these theories. The study has proved that the cohesion theory can provide a reliable theoretical basis for the comparative analysis of Englishand Chinese discourses. Due to the application of corpus-based research approach,this study can present a new research perspective for comparative study based ongenre analysis. At the same time, it is sincerely believed that the research result canprovide meaningful implications for English learners as well as related researchers.Constructive inspiration and guidance are also put forward for academic abstractinterpretation and composition.