Genre Analysis Of Abstracts Of Technical Disclosure In Patent Application Specification

"Genre"is an extremely complicated concept, presented in particular groups of texts. Genre has been studied in a variety of disciplines. The research of genre can be widely divergent, owing to differences in researchers'starting point, emphasis and goal of research, as well as theoretical framework adopted etc. Researches that are function-oriented attach importance to the relationship between the linguistic realization of genre and its social functions, in other words, what are the social functions of a certain genre, how these social functions are realized in the genre, and so on. The object of analysis in this study is 58 abstracts of technical disclosure of patent application specification in the U.S. (primarily electronic, medical and domestic appliances). The present study will be largely conducted in the framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), but obtain some inspirations from the Swalesian approach, and try to explore how genre conditions discourse on the linguistic strata.This paper includes five parts: Part one gives a general survey of genre analysis, briefly introducing current situation of patent application in China and the layout of the paper; Part two reviews previous literature on genre analysis as well as relevant models for analyzing genre, focusing on Hasan's Generic Structural Potential and outlining a tri-stratal model for genre analysis; Part three is data specification, primarily introducing procedures and components of patent application, especially the requirements of abstracts of technical disclosure, and mentioning the situation of data collection; Part four presents the generic structural potential of abstracts in the study and a formula respectively, in addition, detailed linguistic descriptions for the collected data...