A Comparative Study On The Generic Structure Of English And Chinese Abstracts

This paper compares the English abstracts with the Chinese from the perspective of generic structure. The aim of the study is to find to what extent the Chinese abstracts are different from those published in international journals. Following Bhatia's abstract model (1993), the two groups of abstracts will firstly be divided into four units: introduction, methods, results and conclusions. Then the frequency of occurrence of the structure units, the optional and obligatory moves as well as the linear sequence order are identified and compared, which is the first-level study. The second-level study starts from the inside structure of the units. Each of the structure units is further divided into its hierarchical moves, and the English abstracts will be compared with the Chinese move by move. The comparison includes the frequency of the occurrence and the distribution of the moves; the linguistic features (e.g. the initiated words in each move, tense, voice and modals) that signalize the moves. The source material is a corpus of 40 abstracts taken from Chinese and English linguistic journals. The analysis shows that both the English and Chinese abstracts follow Bhatia's model and no instance is out of the parameters of the move model. The linear sequence in both groups of abstracts is Introduction-Methods- Results-Conclusion although some unit is absent in the Chinese abstracts. Introduction unit is obligatory for the texts in both languages. The main difference between the two groups of abstracts in this unit lies in Move 2 (establishing a niche), in which writers justify their work in their research field. English authors were found to employ Move 2 more frequently than the Chinese writers. Methods section is obligatory in the English abstracts but optional in the Chinese abstracts. In the Methods section, the significant difference is the Chinese authors usually utilized one or two epistemic terms (e.g. 定性/定量研究) to present their research methods while the English writers incline to introduce in details the subjects, data sources, procedures and materials, which impress readers as qualitative or quantitative study. Results unit is obligatory in the English abstracts but optional in the Chinese abstracts. The chief difference in this section is the occurrence of this unit in the two languages. The frequency of occurrence of this unit is much higher in the English abstracts. Surprisingly, the past tense and passive voice that characterize this unit were not found in the data analyzed, which is different from the previous researchers' finding. Conclusion section is optional in both groups of abstracts. The significant difference in this section is more hedging used in the English abstracts than in the Chinese. Based on the results, the pedagogical implications are given at the end of the paper.