| Abstract highly condense the main contents of papers,such as the research objectives,methods and conclusion,through which readers can quickly grab the main idea of the articles.For researchers,writing an abstract summarizing their work concisely and succinctly can be especially challenging as it must be clear and concise,providing a summary with all information.The use of grammatical metaphor can make the abstracts concise to a great extent.Recently,there is a growing tendency to study the genres,moves,linguistic features and rhetorical structure of abstracts.Little attention,however,has been paid to the comparative analysis of English abstracts from the perspective of grammatical metaphor,which has become a heated research focus since 1985 when Halliday first put forward the notion of “Grammatical metaphor”.It has been acknowledged that nominalization is commonly used in academic discourse,thus many scholars have conducted investigations into nominalization and its function in academic discourse,with little attention being paid to other aspects of grammatical metaphor.Moreover,there is also a lack of corpus-based comparative study of the use of grammatical metaphor in the empirical research,especially the comparative study of Chinese-speaking linguists’ abstracts and English-speaking linguists’ corresponding abstracts.Therefore,based on the grammatical metaphor theory,this thesis conducts a statistical and contrastive analysis of GM in the selected one hundred pieces of linguistic journal abstracts constructed by Chinese-speaking linguists and English-speaking linguists with quantitative and qualitative methods.The research questions are:(1).What are the distributional features of GM in CSLA and ESLA?(2).What are the similarities of and differences between CSLA and ESLA on the use of GM?(3).What causes the similarities and differences?The major findings of this study are as follows: Firstly,the statistics show that ideational metaphor comprises 5.55%,with interpersonal metaphor comprising 0.05%and textual metaphor comprising 2.11% in Chinese-speaking linguists’ abstracts;while in English-speaking linguists’ abstracts,ideational metaphor comprises 6.45%,with interpersonal metaphor comprising 0.26% and textual metaphor comprising 2.19%.Secondly,there are both similarities and differences in the use of GMs between the two groups.Generally speaking,the similarities are that the use of ideational metaphor is the most,followed by the employment of textual metaphor;the deployment of the interpersonal metaphor is the least in both groups;and the distribution patterns in the two groups can be ranked as ideational metaphor>textual metaphor>interpersonal metaphor.In addition,there is a significant difference in the deployment of interpersonal metaphor in CSLA and that in ESLA(p<0.05).English-speaking linguists’ use of interpersonal metaphor is more advanced than that of Chinese-speaking linguists.English-speaking linguists employ more types to realize interpersonal metaphor and the most prominent type is by using the first person pronoun,while Chinese-speaking linguists seldom use that.Thirdly,the similarities of the two groups on the GM use can be explained by the common standards of abstract writing,that is,conciseness and objectivity.The differences between the two groups on the GM use may result from the differences in thinking mode,cultural background,and disciplinary background.The significance of this thesis lies in that it conducts a comparative analysis of grammatical metaphor and enriching theoretical basis for the study of English abstracts.Through the comparative analysis of grammatical metaphor in English abstracts of linguistic journal articles,the similarities of and differences between the two groups and also the reasons are revealed.Based on the findings of this thesis,it is hoped that this thesis can shed some light on English abstract writing for Chinese scholars,thus enlarging the international influence of Chinese studies. |
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