A Contrastive Study On Lexical Repetition Patterns In English Abstracts Of Chinese And American M.A. Theses

Hoey's lexical repetition patterns is created on the basis of Halliday&Hasan's lexical cohesion. Meanwhile, it also benefits from cohesive harmony that Hasan discusses; repetition-replacement relation that Winter describes as well as the long-distance organization that Phillips puts forward. Given its practicality, scholars set out to apply lexical repetition patterns to English teaching in four aspects: listening, speaking, reading and writing since 1990s. However, few of them take a trial on making a contrastive study on English abstracts of M.A. theses with the application of this theory.This study tries to fill this gap to help Chinese students to improve their abstract writing. At first, the author selects twenty- five English abstracts of M.A. (Master of Arts) theses from CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure) and PQDD (Proquest Digital Dissertation) respectively written by Chinese and American postgraduates whose major is English and American Literature, establishing two corpora. Then a contrastive study on lexical repetition patterns and macrostructures of English abstracts between these two corpora is made to investigate their similarities and differences with the help of software Antconc (version3.2.1.) and software SPSS (version13.0). Finally, we further examine the factors contributing to these similarities and dissimilarities along with the effect of selecting lexical repetition types on the macrostructures of English abstracts to guide our abstract writing.This research shows that (1) there is a statistically significant difference between two corpora in terms of simple lexical repetition and simple paraphrase; while there is no statistically significant difference in terms of complex lexical repetition, complex paraphrase and other lexical repetition models. (2) in terms of macrostructures of English abstracts, Chinese postgraduates prefer BIPMR (Background-Introduction-Purpose-Methodology-Results) pattern, while American postgraduates are fond of the traditional IMRD(Introduction- Methodology- Result-Discussion) pattern. Obviously, on the one hand, Chinese students tend to make use of simple lexical repetition to make up their limitations of vocabulary and their Chinese thinking in English writing, whereas American ones are inclined to employ complex repetition to embody the variety of their vocabulary and their fluency of using the English language. On the other hand, Chinese writers enjoy introducing background information to help readers understand the explicit message when writing abstracts, while American ones like discussing the research results to dig up the implicit message underlying the text.In a nutshell, this thesis will enable our English learners to grasp the main idea of the features of lexical repetition patterns and the macrostructures of English abstracts. What's more, it also sheds light on English abstract writing for Chinese postgraduates.