A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On Lexical Bundles In Moves Of Abstracts In Chinese And American Ma Theses Of Linguistics

Abstract can be viewed as a microcosm of a research paper,helping readers to get a quick understanding of article’ s main content and structure.Besides,it plays a role as a ruler,measuring whether the article fulfills writing requirements and standards or not.Therefore,the study on abstracts writing has been popular,especially from the perspective of lexical bundles or genre.As an important part in genre analysis,rhetorical move is discourse unit of a text and the cooperation of different kinds of moves makes a complete discourse.Three move types are widely accepted in academic field,namely,Santo’s five-move model,Swales’ CARS model and IMRD model.Lexical bundles,the reoccurrence of three or more words,on the other hand,play an important role in fluent and accurate language production,especially in academic writing.As the important carrier of text,the proficient use of lexical bundles reveals the narrowing gap with native speakers.Using the appropriate lexical bundles in each move reveals perfect writing skills.Therefore,this study combines the lexical bundles to move analysis.This thesis collects 200 abstracts of Chinese MA theses and 200 abstracts of American theses in the field of linguistics to build two parallel corpora,namely,Chinese MA These Abstracts of Linguistics Corpus(CTA)and American MA These Abstracts of Linguistics Corpus(ATA).Under the guidance of IMRD move model and taking Biber et al.’s(1999)structural taxonomy and Hyland’s(2008)functional taxonomy of lexical bundles in academic register as references,this thesis probes into the three-word lexical characteristics in different moves of linguistics thesis abstracts written by Chinese and American MA students respectively as well as the distributionpatterns of the target lexical bundles’ discourse functions in each move.The results show that,structurally,marked differences are found in the use of move types and the frequency of single move.American MA thesis writers tend to use4-move types most,while Chinese MA thesis writers are fond of 3-move types.And the use of Method Move with coverage of 99% overwhelms others a lot in CTA,while in ATA each move type is distributed quite evenly.It is also found that Chinese thesis writers use more three-word lexical bundles than their American counterparts.However,they use less diversified structures and expressions.And through the comparison in Result Move,it indicates Chinese thesis writers tend to prefer the deductive thinking pattern while American thesis writers prefer to adopt the inductive thinking pattern.Functionally,significant differences are also obtained in the distribution of research-oriented bundles and participant-oriented bundles.American thesis writers spread almost the same proportion of research-oriented lexical bundles in each move,while huge fluctuation can be found in CTA.And in Result Move and Discussion Move,the proportion of participant-oriented lexical bundles in CTA overwhelms that in ATA a lot,indicating the differences of cultures and different thinking patterns between Chinese and America.Americans prefer to show their results objectively,trying to avoid personal ideas.Through comparison between the two corpora,the study hopes to bring certain awareness and understanding on the abstract writing of English thesis and puts forward some academic writing advice for thesis writers,especially for Chinese thesis writers.