A Genre Analysis Of English Abstracts Of Research Articles In Linguistic Journals

In the past twenty years, many genre analyses of spoken and written discourses have been carried out in academic and professional settings. The particular genre of research article (RA) has received much attention. However, there are limited genre analyses on RA abstracts despite the fact that the abstract is a miniature RA. This thesis is the contrastive study of the English abstracts of RAs published in authorative international and domestic linguistic journals via genre analysis, aiming at helping college English majors and other RA writers improve their awareness of the generic structure of the English abstract and its writing.In this thesis, Swales's Move-Step analysis model was adopted to analyze the generic structures of the forty English abstracts which were taken randomly from four leading international and domestic linguistic journals. They constituted two corpora in this study. One corpus was composed of twenty English abstracts written by writers of NS (native speaker) and named NSC (corpus of NS). The other one consisted of twenty English abstracts written by Chinese writers and was named CC (corpus of Chinese). In this contrastive genre analysis, Bruce's (1983) four-move pattern of IMRD (Introduction Method Result Discussion) was employed in identifying the semantic units. Two linguistic features of hedge and tense were also examined.The results of this contrastive study show that some degree of variation exists despite a certain degree of homogeneity between the abstracts in NSC and those in CC. The generic structure of abstracts in NSC is more complex than that in CC in terms of macrostructure as well as microstructure. A significant difference is the strong tendency to omit Method found in CC. All the frequencies of the four fundamental structural units are higher and the structure of each unit is also more complex in NSC than in CC. In the unit of Introduction, the three moves of Introduction all occur in abstracts in NSC but no M2 (the second Move) in CC. Similarly, NS writers tend to present the other three units more explicitly. Regarding linguistic features of hedge and tense, the modal auxiliary verb and the simple present tense are the most frequent respectively. They distribute differently in the four units to realize different communicative functions.A brief discussion of these differences suggests that NS writers more closely reflect Swales's model in their abstracts, while Chinese writers are less aware of the generic structure of English abstracts. Moreover, those English abstracts in NSC aremore complete in terms of their generic structures. The divergence may be the result of the influence of several socio-cultural factors such as the influence of academic writing instruction and different thinking styles or cultural patterns. Some important pedagogical implications arise from the findings of this paper. Firstly, the prototypical generic structure of English abstract concluded in this study can be useful in the process of teaching English RA abstract writing to English majors. Secondly, this genre-based teaching approach which is characterized by detailed generic analysis and imitation is quite important in the teaching of writing, especially that of ESP (English for Specific Purpose) or EAP (English for Academic Purpose).