Cohesive Devices In English Abstracts Of MA Theses By Chinese And Occidental Writers

In the information era, the prevailing usage of online publication databases calls for well-constructed and informative abstracts, because many search engines for academic purposes only show the abstracts. A sound abstract can present a panorama of the whole paper and entice readers’to get the full copy. An abstract, as a fully self-contained, capsule description of a research, also plays an indispensable role in MA thesis, so graduate students need to try their utmost to compose meaningful, logical, and clarified abstracts for their theses. The impression of conciseness and completeness of abstracts is commonly attributed to lexical and grammatical features, but textual features also contribute to it. One such textual feature is cohesion, i.e. the devices that render a text cohesive in terms of five major cohesive ties including reference, ellipsis, substitution, lexical cohesion, and conjunction (Halliday&Hasan,1976). Since the publication of Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion in English (1976), cohesion and coherence have become two essential concepts of text analysis. They point out that cohesion is the foundation of coherence and it is the most important prerequisite for a text. Many researchers have explored the effects that cohesion theory exerts on English writing teaching, and have performed numerous experiments from different perspectives. However, little research has been carried out on abstracts of MA theses with reference to the application of cohesion theory, let alone the studies on comparing the usage of cohesion across writers and subjects.Halliday and Hasan have made comprehensive and authoritative classification and clarification since1976. Based on their cohesion theory, some modifications and supplements are made to meet the need of this research. The categories of cohesive patterns in different periods are reviewed and integrated to sum up a coding scheme with explanations of each cohesive pattern. Specifically, this study concentrates on three types of cohesive devices:reference, conjunction, and lexical cohesion.This study probes patterns of cohesion in English abstracts of MA Theses at home and abroad. The reason for choosing abstracts as the analyzed texts is that they present information in a compact manner, exhibiting a high information density (Swales,1990; Biber,2006). The corpus of abstracts under investigation is a self-built corpus derived from two large databases, PQDT and CDMD of CNKI. In this study,120abstracts from2 disciplines (computer science and linguistics) and2sources of the large databases are investigated by taking samples of30abstracts from each discipline and source. Patterns of cohesion in the samples are manually marked using the UAM Corpus tool and lexical cohesion is automatically annotated using another corpus tool Lexical Cohesion Helper. The annotation is then manually compared and corrected to ensure reliability.The aim of this study is to present comprehensive description, comparison, and discussion on the cohesive ties in the selected abstracts. The purpose is threefold. First, this study is to find out the features of cohesion in abstracts as a special genre of writing. The main interest lies in possible differences and commonalities in the usage of cohesive devices across two research dimensions, i.e. source of texts and discipline of texts. Simultaneously, the potential reasons for group differences and similarities are discussed. As by-products, some explanations are added when overuses and misusages of cohesion occur in Chinese MA thesis abstracts.The data analysis provides several findings. Firstly, cohesive devices in abstracts show distinctive features, that is to say, lexical cohesion occupies the most followed by reference and conjunction. Secondly, the results indicate that differences between sources of texts are much greater than those between the groups of subjects. Specifically, Chinese students’ employments of certain cohesive devices differ significantly from those of the occidental students’, in particular in the use of lexical cohesion. Chinese students especially those majoring in computer science depend on limited choices of lexical cohesion and display problems in using reference and conjunction when constructing abstracts.Based on the research findings, some theoretical and practical implications are given. It is hoped that this study can enrich studies on MA thesis abstracts and throw some new light on cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary analysis of this academic genre. However, due to the intrinsic complexity of examinations and several limitations, the feature of cohesive devices is in need of further studies.