A Contrastive Study Of The Grammatical Cohesion In English Abstracts Of MA Theses Written By The Chinese And The American Postgraduates

play a significant role in today’s academic communication and they are taken seriously by both Chinese and foreign researchers. Numerous researches have been done on the abstract from different angles. However, the author finds that most of the previous studies are the contrast between the Chinese abstracts written by the Chinese postgraduates and the English abstracts written by the American postgraduates, few of them compare the English abstracts written by both the Chinese and the American postgraduates. Moreover, only some of them deal with the abstract in terms of cohesion.Cohesion is a major way of forming text and it plays an important part in discourse analysis. Since the cohesion theory was put forward by Halliday and Hasan in the book Cohesion in English in 1976, it has attracted much attention from scholars and researchers both at home and abroad. According to the cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan, cohesion can be divided into grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Many researchers have applied grammatical cohesion to analyze various kinds of texts such as literature works, legal texts, advertisements, compositions and so on. Nevertheless, rare studies have been done on the grammatical cohesion of academic paper abstracts.On account of this, this paper tries to make a contrastive study on the grammatical cohesion used in the 200 English abstracts written by the Chinese and the American postgraduates. At the same time, it aims to find out the similarities and differences in using the grammatical cohesion between the Chinese and the American postgraduates, the possible reasons that give rise to these similarities and differences will also be explored.Two hundred English abstracts in the master theses written by the Chinese and the American postgraduates from CNKI and PQDT were selected as the research data of the present study. All of them were in the field of English Language and Literature or Linguistics and were published during the year 2010-2014. After the selection of the data, the four types of grammatical cohesion used in the 200 English abstracts were manually identified according to the classification of grammatical cohesion made by Halliday and Hasan. They were then analyzed by adopting the combination of quantitative and qualitative approach.By detailed analysis and discussion of the research data, the results show that altogether three types of grammatical cohesion are used by the Chinese and the American postgraduates: they are reference, substitution and conjunction. However, ellipsis doesn’t occur in both the Chinese and the American corpus. Among the three types of grammatical cohesion, reference takes up the largest proportion, it is followed by conjunction and the least used type of grammatical cohesion is substitution. Furthermore, the results also indicate that there are some differences between the two corpora in using the three types of grammatical cohesion. In terms of reference, there are significant differences in using “object; passage of text” in personal reference, “demonstrative, near” in demonstrative reference and “general similarity” in comparative reference between the two corpora. The Chinese postgraduates use more “object; passage of text” and “general similarity”, however, they use less “demonstrative, near” than the American postgraduates do. Besides, the two corpora are also significantly different in terms of the subtypes of conjunction. More “following”, “durative” in “spatio-temporal” and “general” in “causal-conditional” are used by the Chinese postgraduates, while “specific” in “causal-conditional” is much more employed by the American postgraduates.The results of this study are not only beneficial to the practical use of cohesion theory in abstracts analysis but also enable the Chinese English major postgraduates and scholars to have a general understanding of the cohesion theory and the abstracts in academic papers.