Comparison Of Metadiscourse In English And Chinese Academic Texts

Science and technology(sci-tech)research articles(RAs)are the specific text types for theoretical analysis and instructive summary of sci-tech research results,which hold an obvious significance for communication,progress and development.The sci-tech research article abstracts(RA abstracts),like the window of the article,not only report the research results,but function as attracting readers to read further with specific language use.Metadiscourse(MD)is an integral part of the discourse and helps the author to organize the discourse and guide the reader to understand it.At the same time,metadiscourse assists the author to negotiate and interact with the reader,and allows the reader to fully participate in the interpretation of the discourse.So far,most of the research on academic writing have been conducted from the perspective of linguistics,such as stance markers or evidentials,but relatively little research has been conducted on MD.This study takes the interpersonal metadiscourse model,proposed by the linguist Ken Hyland(2005b),as the analysis framework to systematically study the metadiscourse features of RA abstracts,both English and Chinese,in petroleum science.To conduct the research,the corpus of RA abstracts in petroleum science is built,which includes two sub-corpus,namely,English Abstracts Corpus(EAC)and Chinese Abstracts Corpus(CAC).The data is randomly and evenly collected from authoritative journals published in 2020 at home and abroad,50 in English and 50 in Chinese.To conpare the features of metadiscourse markers(MMs)in RA abstracts,an annotation system is designed and the corresponding tags are manually added to MMs.Based on the annotated corpus and using the interpersonal metadiscourse model as the analysis framework,the general features of MD of RA abstracts in the petroleum field are first described.Then,the similarities and differences in the use of MD in English and Chinese abstracts are compared from the perspectives of interactive MD and interactive MD respectively.The results indicate that MD in petroleum RA abstracts displays its own pattern.Interactive markers are more frequently used than interactional ones in petroleum RA abstracts.Among the 10 sub-categories of MD,seven have significant differences between EAC and CAC.Frame markers,endophoric markers,evidentials and attitude markers demonstrate the features that MD are overused in EAC than in CAC.Code glosses,self-mentions and engagement markers present that MD are underused in EAC than in CAC.It means that writers of English RA abstracts have a stronger awareness of MD than writers of Chinese RA abstracts.This study combines RA abstracts with MD studies,enriching and expanding the study of MD in stylistic analysis of academic genres.In addition,it is also significant in assisting writers with MD resources in creating papers.