A Comparative Genre Analysis Of M.A. Thesis Abstracts In Linguistics

As the symbol of the research thesis, the abstracts not only describe the research objectively and scientifically but also can help the readers understand the major contents of the thesis quickly. The abstract is considered as the important tools of demonstrating the newest academic trend in its field. The abstract has been the focus of many studies for a long time. And recently there are more and more studies about the academic paper in the aspect of the genre analysis in linguistics. But the genre study about the abstracts of M.A. theses is fewer. This thesis is designed to fill this vacancy.In order to find out the similarities and differences of the English abstracts between the English and Chinese writers, we establish two corpora each select50samples from the native English speakers and the foreign college of the Liaoning Normal University postgraduate students respectively. In this study, we compare the the generic structure and the linguistic features of the English thesis abstracts between the native English speakers and the Liaoning Normal University postgraduate students. We adopt the Introduction-Method-Results-Discussions model proposed by Bruce (1983) and Create a Research Space model proposed by Swales (1990), such as grammatical tenses, voices and the first person pronoun. The aim of this thesis is to explore the generic structure and the linguistic features of the thesis abstracts in linguistics and find the similarities and differences of the thesis abstracts of the native English speakers and Liaoning Normal University students. Therefore we hope that this research can help the students for the abstracts writing, especially for the postgraduate students in Liaoning Normal University.According to the macro-structure the findings of the research demonstrates that the native English speakers and Liaoning Normal University postgraduate students’theses abstracts are conformed with the Introduction-Method-Results-Discussions (IMRD) pattern. In addition, we find that the Introduction unit and the Results unit are indispensable for the thesis abstracts written by the native English authors while is opposed to the Introduction unit written by the Liaoning Normal University postgraduate students. As for the linguistic features, the simple present and the active voice is used most frequently, the active voice prevails the passive voice in all rhetoric units in addition to the Method unit. And referring to the first person pronouns, the frequency is low.It is hoped that the findings of this study can large the Liaoning Normal University postgraduate students’knowledge on the generic structure and the linguistic features. Therefore, the study may help the Liaoning Normal University postgraduate students’reading and writing of the English thesis abstracts in linguistics.