A Contrastive Study On Employment Of Metadiscourse In Chinese Abstracts Of Masters’ Theses

Employing metadiscourse properly in Chinese writing such as Chinese abstract of masters’ theses can help the writer organize the text logically and present the research process clearly.Since Harris puts forward the concept of metadiscourse in the 19th century,many researchers prefer to choosing English texts to conduct contrastive studies.However,there are few studies that analyze metadiscourse in other languages.Therefore,this research chooses Chinese abstracts in masters’ theses of English majors and non-English majors in a university to make a contrastive study,analyzing the employment of metadiscourse and exploring possible factors that might influence the employment.There are three questions in this research:1)What are similarities and differences of employing metadiscourse between English majors and non-English majors?2)What are functions of employing each type of metadiscourse in two groups?3)What are possible factors that influence employment of metadiscourse in Chinese s?90 Chinese abstracts of masters’ theses from China Knowledge Network Infrastructure(CNKI)in the past three years are collected and they are divided into two groups.According to Hyland’s classification of metadiscourse and some research about Chinese metadiscourse,the writer marks,classifies,counts and compares the use of metadiscourse in two groups.At the same time,10 masters who have graduated in the past three years are invited to make an interview.Based on the result and discussion,the research conclusion is as follows:1)Both English majors and non-English majors prefer to using more interactive metadiscourse than interactional metadiscourse.And English majors use more metadiscourse in their s.In the perspective of frequency and variety,there are significant differences in the employment of self-mentions,hedges,transition markers,evidentials and endophoric markers between the two groups.2)Functions of employing each type of metadiscourse are demonstrated and there are different features between the two groups.English majors are better at employing metadiscourse in Chinese abstracts to organize the text logically and show the originality of the research.3)According to results of the interview and some theories,there are four factors that can influence the employment of metadiscourse in Chinese abstracts:students’ attitude to Chinese abstract,course arrangement in different disciplines,English proficiency and students’ self-learning experience.