Functional Analysis Of Impersonal Constructions In English Abstracts Of Research Articles From The Transitivity Perspective

In the informational age with increasing scientific production, English abstract has become an important means to transmit scientific research findings. In order to win international recognition, researchers have to write well-informed English abstracts. Therefore research into English abstracts of research articles has gradually drawn linguists' attention.Scientific genre is regarded impersonal by nature, so is the case with the abstract. Impersonal construction, in which the human agency is concealed, is one of the most important means to render an abstract the characteristic of impersonality. This kind of construction has been mentioned yet underexplored in the previous studies. Transitivity system proposed by Halliday provides various syntactic resources for the agency concealment so that the researcher can strategically distance from the text. Therefore this paper focuses on the transitivity structure of the research article abstract (RA abstract). It aims to reveal the features of the transitivity structure that characterize the RA abstract and the way in which the impersonal constructions are distributed in the RA abstract. In this thesis the RA abstracts are only confined to those published in the English academic journals. Fifty RA abstracts are chosen at random from two leading English applied linguistics journals and then analysis of transitivity structure is conducted. Chi-square test is employed to testify the results of the statistics with a significance level of 0.01. The transitivity analysis reveals that the distribution of transitivity processes in the RA abstracts displays regularities that characterize the genre. Most of the processes are associated with impersonal constructions and the distribution of these impersonal constructions varies across the moves. The findings are explained in terms of the three metafunctions of language. Functional interpretation shows that these impersonal constructions not only help a RA abstract to achieve its ideational meaning, enabling the researcher to convey his/her research findings objectively and effectively, but also help it toachieve its interpersonal and textual meaning.It is expected that the findings of the research will contribute to the development of English learners' awareness of the grammatical forms that typify RA abstracts and more importantly guide researchers and postgraduates in lexio-grammatical choices in writing RA abstracts.