Grammatical Metaphor In English Abstracts:A Comparative Study Between English-speaking And Chinese-speaking Linguists

As one of the most important constitutes in academic articles,abstracts are the high concentration of the whole article and play a very significant role in readers’ understanding of the research content,such as research object,research importance,research method and so on.On one hand,abstract gives expression to authors’ professional standard and academic level.On the other hand,it has a great effect upon readers’ desire to read.Therefore,to a certain degree,it can be said that the quality of abstracts is directly connected to the papers’ number of being searched and being quoted.Recently,the study of abstracts in research articles is mainly conducted from the following two perspectives: firstly,some scholars concentrate on the structure of abstracts based on the level of genre analysis,which can be further conducted both from macro and micro dimensions;secondly,some researchers make some explorations of abstracts from the viewpoint of contrastive linguistics.Concerning the grammatical metaphors in abstracts of research articles,some existing analyses just put emphasis on the general analysis of abstracts in academic papers,without confining the research in a certain filed or taking factors like register variants,researchers’ identity into full consideration,which actually have an impact on abstracts in terms of micro linguistic characteristics.Even though some specify the object of research in a certain academic filed,the data is either English abstracts in most cases or only Chinese abstracts.As for the comparative analysis of English abstracts written by English-speaking and Chinese-speaking linguists,there is few.Therefore,this thesis chooses the English abstracts of academic papers written by English-speaking and Chinese-speaking linguists as the data of research and conducts a comparative analysis of them from the perspective of grammatical metaphors.In thisstudy,the following two questions are mainly probed into: ⑴Are there any similarities or differences between these two groups of data in terms of the usage of grammatical metaphors? If yes,in what ways do they show the similarities or differences specifically? ⑵What are the underlying reasons of these similarities or differences?After investigation,it is found that in terms of the application of grammatical metaphors in English abstracts,there are both similarities and differences between English-speaking and Chinese-speaking linguists.Some major findings are as follows:concerning similarities,firstly,grammatical metaphor is pervasively used in English abstracts both of English and Chinese linguistic academic articles;secondly,Type 2,Type 13,Type 5,Type 6 and Type 1 account for the most-employed position in them,leaving the other types far behind.Regarding differences,the most important point is that in general grammatical metaphors are employed more frequently by English-speaking linguists than Chinese-speaking linguists in the process of writing English abstracts,though the gap is not so big.The similarities are under the restriction of the common characteristics of technical discourse writing and the different understandings of linguistics’ disciplinary nature give rise to the differences between them.Based on relevant findings and the motivations behind them,it is hoped that this thesis can shed some light on a more standard,more idiomatic writing of English abstracts for Chinese linguists,thus enlarging the international influence of their researches.