A Contrastive Study Of Textual Cohesion In The Method Section Of Scientif Ic Research Papers Written By Chinese And American Writers In English

With the progress of globalization,English for Scientific and Technology(EST)plays a more eminent role for academic exchanges in world arena.As an important dimension to evaluate the quality of papers,textual cohesion needs to be paid enough attention to.Hence,the present paper makes a comparative study on textual cohesion of English scientific papers written by C hinese and American scholars in order to give some implications for C hinese scholars to writer more cohesive papers and get them published.Firstly,in accordance with Halliday and Hasan’s(1976)and N iu Baoyi’s(1998)cohesion frameworks,the present paper does thorough studies on textual cohesion by putting both explicit cohesion and implicit cohesion into consideration,which contain three dimensions: connectives,lexical cohesion and situation model.The connectives and referential cohesion can be categorized into explicit cohesion and latent semantic analysis(LSA)in lexical cohesion,and situation model into implicit cohesion.Secondly,by using self-made corpus,the present paper makes a comparison of Method by means of Coh-Metrix.Overall,the C hinese authors’ papers are not as well as those by Americans in explicit cohesion,but no differences exist in implicit cohesion between the two.With respect to connectives,the results indicate that there are significant differences in frequenc ies of logical,adversative and contrastive connectives and C hinese papers contain more additive connectives,although the total number of connectives shows no differences between the two corpora.In regard to lexical cohesion,no difference is found in terms of LSA indices.However,American papers are significantly higher in the use of argument and stem overlap in referential cohesion.As regards the construction of a situation model,Chinese scholars do as well as the American counterparts.Besides these macro-studies on textual cohesion,the thesis continues to make detailed quantitative micro-studies on individual connectors by using AntConc and making a qualitative analysis on the stem and argument overlap.Results indicate that nine show significant differences among the eighty-nine connectors.The connectors overused by Chinese writers are and,but,still,thus,so,as and those underused are however,due to,secondly.With reference to stem overlap and argument overlap,their differences might be caused by different ways of thinking and senses of language : Chinese is a paratactic and analytic language and English hypotactic and inflectional one.Nevertheless,Chinese writers can overcome the issue by using the explicit devices of derivation and inflection to increase the argument and stem overlap among sentences.To make their English more idiomatic and their writings more acceptable,C hinese writers should make a balance between the uses of different types of connectives.Especially,they should pay attention into the appropriate use of logical connectives and adversative and contrastive connectives.Besides,the way of their thinking should change when they use different types of lexical overlap to increase their textual cohesion for C hinese and English are two different types of language.Overall,C hinese writers should master the native-like textual cohesive ties and overcome the negative transfer of mother-tongue thinking in order to achieve both explicit and implicit cohesion in English papers writing.