A Comparative Study On Syntactic Positions Of Adverbials In Abstracts Of Master Theses And Doctoral Dissertations By Chinese And English Native Speakers

English academic discourses have recently received more and more attention in linguistic research.As an indispensable part of academic discourses,master’s theses and doctoral dissertations become one of the important research subjects in linguistics,therefore their abstracts also become an important research area.However,there are few comparative studies on the syntactic position of adverbials in English abstracts of master theses and doctoral dissertations by English native speakers(ENS)and Chinese native speakers(CNS),and Chinese English learners still have some problems in mastering the syntactic position of adverbials.Based on the self-constructed corpora of English abstracts of master theses and doctoral dissertations by CNS and ENS(each with about 100,000 words),this study compares the positional distribution(sentence-initial,sentence-medial M1,M2 and M3,and sentence-final)of adverbials(circumstance adverbials,linking adverbials and stance adverbials)in abstracts of master theses and doctoral dissertations by CNS and ENS from the perspective of different text types and different semantic categories in order to understand the positional similarities and differences in English academic writings between CNS and ENS.The findings of the present study are shown as follows:From the perspective of different text types:(1)In abstracts of master theses,both CNS and ENS are least likely to place adverbials in medial positions,and CNS show a clear pre-position preference,which is in contrast to the post-position preference by ENS;and in all three medial positions(M1,M2 and M3),there are significant differences between CNS and ENS;(2)In abstracts of doctoral dissertations,medial positions are also least likely to be chosen by CNS and ENS;and besides the pre-position tendency,which is different from the post-position preference by ENS,CNS also show a significant difference with ENS in M2position;(3)There is no significant positional difference between adverbials in abstracts of master theses and those in abstracts of doctoral dissertations by ENS;but compared with Chinese postgraduate students,Chinese Ph D candidates show a stronger tendency to place adverbials in the end position;the frequency of adverbials in M3 position used by Chinese postgraduate students shows a significant difference with frequency of those by Chinese Ph D candidates.From the perspective of different semantic categories:(1)As for four semantic categories of circumstance adverbials,all of them in the two corpora occur least frequently in medial positions;and time and process adverbials in the two corpora both show a relatively higher frequency in medial positions;contingency adverbials in the two corpora show the same pre-position tendency;process and place adverbials in abstracts written by CNS display the same post-position tendency as ENS;the difference is that compared with the obvious post-position tendency of ENS,time adverbials by CNS occur most frequently in sentence-initial positions;(2)As for four semantic categories of linking adverbials,both CNS and ENS prefer sentence-initial positions,with adversative adverbials showing the highest frequency among four categories;in the initial position,CNS show significantly higher frequencies of causal and sequential adverbials than ENS do,but ENS show a more flexible positional choice of causal and sequential adverbials;(3)As for stance adverbials,CNS and ENS both prefer to place epistemic and attitude adverbials most frequently in medial positions and are least likely to place style adverbials in medial positions;further research proves that ENS are more likely to place epistemic adverbials in M3 position and CNS are more likely to place epistemic adverbials in M1 position;as for attitude adverbials in M3 position,the frequency of them by CNS is much higher than that of them by ENS.This study can help CNS to have a deeper understanding of the positional distribution of the three types of adverbials to some extent.The results of this study have strong implications for the use and teaching of syntactic position of adverbials in academic discourse and for English-Chinese and Chinese-English translation of adverbials.