| As an exact and concise summary of the source article, abstract continues to grow in importance. In the past years, many manuals have been published to instruct the standardized writing of abstracts. Meanwhile, descriptive studies on the structural and linguistic features of abstracts in special disciplines were carried out from the perspective of genre analysis. Besides, some cross-cultural or cross-linguistic researches have been conducted, and the comparative study of English and Spanish research paper abstracts in experimental social sciences is a case in point. However, the comparative study of journal abstracts in English and Chinese was rare. This thesis attempts to explore the similarities and differences of English and Chinese linguistic journal abstracts in term of their macro generic structures as well as micro textual components, with a special aim to facilitate abstract teaching and the awareness of cross-cultural differences in abstract construction. The functional linguistics is employed as the general framework for the present research.This thesis begins with an introduction of the theories related to the present study. Hasan's theory of generic structural potential, which aims to identify obligatory and optional structural elements as well as their sequencing and recursion, is illustrated with Hasan's examples of service encounters. Besides, the theories of thematic structure and cohesion are briefly stated. As "the point of departure", the choice of theme is by no means a random process. While cohesion, as non-structural resources, will contribute a lot to the semantic unity and texture of a whole text if used effectively.After the theoretical presentation, the author of the thesis makes a clarification of the data collection and the procedures of the research. The source materials of the present study are made up of 30 English abstracts written by native English speakers from 4 international linguistic journals and 30 Chinese abstracts from 4Chinese linguistic journals. Then, a large space of the thesis is devoted to the manifestation of the generic structural potential and the textual organization of the English and Chinese abstracts respectively.Following the manifestation, the similarities and differences between the two groups of abstracts are discussed. The study indicates that the same structural elements, i.e. background (B), purpose of study (PS), theoretical framework (TF), focus of study (FS), research design (RD), result (R) and conclusion (C) constitute the generic structural potential of the English and Chinese linguistic journal abstracts. However, throughout the data, none of the structural elements are found to be obligatory. Instead, only regular elements and optional elements could be identified. In the English abstracts, the regular structural elements are B, PS, RD and R, while the regular structural elements in the Chinese abstracts only include PS, RD and R. Moreover, the two groups of abstracts show differences in the sequencing of specific elements, and compared with the Chinese abstracts, the actual generic structures of the English abstracts seem to be more complicated and enjoy more flexibility. With regards to the distribution of themes, the English and Chinese abstracts show similarities in the priority of experiential themes to textual themes and interpersonal themes, and most of the experiential themes are realized by non-agent subjects. At the same time, nominalization, which is common in scientific writing, is also found in both groups of abstracts. However, more marked experiential themes appear in the English abstracts, which are either used to introduce a background section or to suggest a theoretical framework, while in the Chinese abstracts, more indicators of the structural elements like "本文" and " 结果" appear at the theme position. In thematic development, it seems that the Chinese abstracts show less variation in thematic patterns. As for the cohesive devises, lexical cohesion is found to be the most prominent type in both groups of...
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