An Ideational Functional Comparative Analysis Of English Abstracts In Economic Journals

With the rapid economic development, more and more economic exchanges appear between China and foreign countries. The economic journals can adapt to the development of market economy and they are also the fastest growing, most up-to-date and promising publications. However, there are only few domestic economic articles that can be indexed into the core international economic journals. English abstract, an independent short passage with high information density, is the only source for foreign countries to access to Chinese academic information, so it has attracted many researchers’ attention. The researches on English abstracts mainly focus on journals in such fields as technology, medicine and computer, while the researches on that of economic journals are really rare. This thesis aims to find out the differences in English abstract writing between Chinese English learners and the native speakers of English. Therefore, it helps Chinese students in economic major and researchers to improve their ability of English abstract writing.Based on the theory of Halliday’s ideational meta-function, this thesis uses quantitative and qualitative approaches, selects 50 English abstracts from domestic and international core economic journals respectively and establishes two small equal-sized databases(12,043 words in total), in which the domestic essays are from Economist and Economic Review( shortly called EE) and international articles from The American Economic Review and The Economic Journal( shortly called AE). The two databases are comparatively analyzed from three aspects—transitivity, voice and the logical function in order to figure out the similarities and differences in the characteristics of distribution of the three aspects.The research results show that: i) material and relational processes are predominant in the English abstracts of both EE and AE, and the percentage of material processes is obviously higher than that of relational processes in the Method move. However, in the abstracts of EE, the highest percentage of relational processes appears in the Result move while it appears in the Discussion move in AE. That means the domestic economic researchers tend to use relational processes to describe the relationship among the study objects or the internal structure of object itself, while western researchers tend to use them to state the contacts between the study results and the external reality in order to get a better and feasible application. ii) The percentage of active voice is higher than that of passive voice in the English abstracts of both EE and AE, but in the Introduction move, the frequency of occurrence of passive voice in AE is much higher than that in EE. The result indicates that the western researchers pay more attention to objectivity of the background information in Introduction move. iii) In terms of logical function, the preference of using hypotaxis and extension clause complex is obviously shown in the English abstracts in both EE and AE. However, the proportion of hypotaxis in abstracts in AE is significantly higher than that in EE while the use of extension in EE is more than that in AE. The western researchers are more skilled in using subordinate clauses including attributive clauses, object clauses, appositive clauses, adverbial clauses and predicative clauses while the domestic researchers are only good at using finite clauses and using them repeatedly.This thesis finds out the similarities and differences in English abstracts between domestic and international economic journals. According to these differences, we can find out the gap, which will help to improve the ability of Chinese English users and learners to write English abstracts.