A Study Of Academic Journal Abstracts In Science And Literature: From The Perspective Of Critical Discourse Analysis

The rapid development of science and technology in the changing society as well as globalization leads to the blossom of academic communications. Abstract, as a distinct academic genre, is the first point of contact between academic writer and potential readers and to a great extent decides whether the original text would be read. It plays a more and more important role in academic communication and has been given special attention to by many scholars. However, conventional wisdom on abstracts considers the abstract as only providing the main points of a study as briefly, concisely and "objectively" as possible with certain writing regularities. Yet the studies on abstracts have fallen into the scope of genre analysis mainly concerning on the linguistic lay and academic writing.Based on Halliday's systemic-functional grammar and Fairclough's three-dimensional critical discourse analysis model, this thesis has developed a theoretical framework for the analysis of academic abstract. An analysis of 20 academic journal abstracts from the field of science and literature is carried out to explore how abstracts are constructed within specific social, historical context and how those social and ideological factors are maintained and reproduced through language as well as to reveal the differences and similarities of the two types of abstracts, including some trends in their current academic practices. The study is significant in the following aspects: first, it helps English learners and relevant researchers get a deeper understanding of abstract language and thus facilitate academic communication; second, it redounds to foster English learners' critical language awareness which is really important in language teaching and learning; finally, the study also demonstrates and tests the accountability of critical discourse analysis to this special kind of written texts—abstract and its universality of application, and further enriches the application of theories of critical discourse analysis in different research fields.The result of the present study, on the one hand, indicates that abstracts in science and literature, while sharing some features with each other, differ in several important aspects and meanwhile abstracts are no longer conventionally prescribed but socially...