A Contrastive Genre Analysis Of English And Chinese Research Articles Of Social Science

Recent years have seen a great number of research articles (RAs) published nationally and internationally to make new knowledge claims and report research results within the academic community. Research articles are usually written according to some conventional patterns, which are generally determined. Thus RA, a typical genre in academic and professional settings, has attracted attentions from applied linguists and language teachers, in particular from those in the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) (Swales, 1981, 1990; Bhatia, 1993, etc). The way in which writers organize their RAs may reflect their educational, linguistic, historical and cultural backgrounds. The present study was also prompted by the growing interest of genre analysis with move-step model and by the initial work of contrastive rhetoric of Kaplan (1966) who put forward the notion of' language-culture-specificity'.There are three traditions in genre analyses: ESP genre analysis, North American New Rhetoric studies and Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The present study adopts ESP genre analysis, which allows a far thicker description of functional varieties of written and spoken language (Bhatia, 1993). From the review of previous researches, it is noticed that most researchers focused the studies on textual properties or independent sections, only a few studies were devoted to exploring the global generic structure of RAs. In China, it was found virtually no one investigated the global generic structure of RAs. Am contrastive studies between English and Chinese RAs of social science have also been an under-studied territory which deserves necessary attention.Therefore, the present study aims at examining the similarities and differences in the macro and micro structures between English and Chinese RAs of social science that may allow more variation than natural science. The two corpora were established by random sampling, one of which was made up of 30 RAs written by Chinese researchers randomly selected from the key journal of The Social Sciences In China, 1999-2005, totally 347,200 words; the other...