A Contrastive Analysis Of English Abstracts In Light Of Appraisal Theory

With the development of social economy, English has become the important tool tocommunicate with each other in the world. To write an English article is necessary forresearchers to publish in international journals. As a condensed version of a long article, theabstract sums up the main ideas of the paper and helps readers decide whether to read the paperfully or not. A well-written abstract will draw the readers’ attention to read continually.Therefore, it is significant and crucial for Chinese researchers to write well-organized abstractsaccording to the international standard.Appraisal system put forward by Martin&White (2005) is a new development ofSystemic Functional Linguistics and it is also an important method to investigate theinterpersonal meanings in abstracts. Appraisal theory comprises three subsystems: attitude,engagement and graduation. Based on appraisal theory, the present study aims to make acontrastive analysis of abstracts between scholars’ articles and students’ dissertations.The current study comprises60English abstracts in the field of linguistics. They are frominternational journal articles and research article abstracts written by second language studentsin Chinese mainland. All the articles are published or submitted in the year of2011and2012.Based on appraisal theory, this paper adopts quantitative and qualitative approaches andattempts to investigate the realizations and distributions of appraisal resources in journalabstracts group and thesis abstracts group.The research shows that there are some similarities and differences on the realizations anddistributions of attitude, engagement and graduation resources. With attitude, affect, judgmentand appreciation resources distribute from low to high in the two groups. Appreciationresources have the largest proportion. However, scholars adopt more affect resources and lessjudgment resources than students. With engagement, dialogic contraction resources are slightlymore than dialogic expansion resources. Scholars adopt more counter resources and pronounceresources than students. It shows that professional scholars have a preference for presentingtheir propositions directly and confidently. With graduation resources, force occupies a largerpart than focus in the two groups. However, scholars have a preference for sharpen resources,while students have a tendency of soften resources. It reveals that scholars prefer to up-scaletheir voice and students prefer to down-scale their voice.This thesis would give us a better understanding of abstracts and would present somebeneficial strategies for second language students to writer better academic abstracts. Thepresent study also indicates that the novices would write good academic abstracts by studying the articles of professional scholars and keep a watchful eye on appraisal resources.