A Contrastive Study Of Negation In Introduction Of Academic Papers By Chinese Ph.d.students And Native English Speakers

The academic paper is a genre with particular purposes and language characteristic.In academic papers,negation is widely used to express the author’s negative views,which needs much attention.However,few studies on the use of negation in Ph.D.students’ academic writing have been conducted.As novice researchers,Ph.D.students have need to publish papers in international journals and write graduation thesis in English.Due to the importance of introduction in academic papers,this study investigates the differences in the use of negation in introductions by Chinese Ph.D.students and English native speakers and aims to answer the following questions:(1)What are syntactic differences in the use of negation between native English speakers and Chinese Ph.D.students in their academic writings?(2)What are lexical differences in the use of negation between native English speakers and Chinese Ph.D.students in their academic writings?(3)What are the reasons for these differences?In this study,we built two corpora(Chinese Ph.D.Students’ Writing Corpus and English Native Speakers’ Writing Corpus).Based on the classification of negation proposed by Quirk & Crystal(1985),this study analyzed 236 academic papers and compared the use of negation in introduction of academic papers written by Chinese Ph.D.students and native English speakers through quantitative and qualitative analysis.The results showed that there were significant differences and similarities between the two groups.Firstly,English speakers use more negation than Chinese Ph.D.students as Chinese students prefer to use affirmative sentences to strengthen their ideas.Secondly,at the syntactic level,native speakers do not have a clear preference on the use of clause negation,while Clause negation other than through verbs are frequently employed in compositions of Chinese Ph.D.students.Local negation is barely used in both two corpora.Native speakers prefer to choose not-negation.Negators such as no,not,little,and hardly are usually used to function as clause negation and local negation.Thirdly,at the lexical level,negative adjectives,verbs and nouns occupy a large proportion in both two corpora,among which negative adjectives are most frequently used.Chinese Ph.D.students tend to use non-affix negative adjectives,while native English speakers tend to use affix negative adjectives.First language transfer and cultural differences are two reasons for these differences.The negative form in Chinese is relatively fixed because of the fewer morphological changes.English is prominent in morphological changes.Affixes are indispensable in forming words or expressing grammatical relations which explains that multiple negative derivatives exit in English.Therefore,there are more various negative expressions in English than in Chinese.English emphasizes hypotaxis while Chinese emphasizes parataxis.Under the influence of Chinese traditional culture,linguistic expressions in Chinese are implicit and euphemistic.Thus,Chinese Ph.D.students tend to use implicit negative expressions in academic writings.This research,to some degree,has enriched the study of negation in academic papers which is barely explored before.Meanwhile,it also provide suggestions for second language learners to have a better understanding of negative expressions and use them in an effective way.