A Contrastive Study On Textual Cohesion Of English And Chinese Research Article Abstracts

A well-written English abstract provides the convenience for the inclusion of scientific informative retrieval systems (SCI, EI, ISTP, etc.). Therefore, the English research article (RA) abstract writing is of vital importance for scholars to demonstrate their research in international academic interflow. Traditional studies on RA abstracts focus on the genre and stylistic analysis of English RA abstracts by native speakers, but few contrastive studies have been made on the textual cohesion between English RA abstracts and Chinese ones.Based on basic theories on contrastive linguistics and text linguistics, the present study is undertaken to find out similarities and differences between English and Chinese RA abstracts in terms of textual cohesion, aiming at a better understanding of English RA abstract writing for scholars in China.In order to achieve the above goal, established in this thesis are an English corpus composed of 30 English RA abstracts from Journal of Computer and System Science and a Chinese corpus composed of 30 Chinese RA abstracts from Chinese Journal of Computers. The contrastive study of textual cohesion between English and Chinese RA abstracts falls into two parts: (1) contrast of non-structural cohesion achieved by reference, conjunction and lexical cohesion; (2) contrast of structural cohesion achieved by thematic progression. In the comparison of non-structural cohesion, descriptive methods are mainly applied with abundant examples from both corpora. In the comparison of structural cohesion, sample analysis is done first, and then statistical analysis is made to confirm the results in the sample analysis.The results show that there are both similarities and differences in English and Chinese RA abstracts. (1) There are more personal references in English RA abstracts, especially the frequent use of the plural forms of the first person "we/our/us", while no use of the plural forms of the first person in Chinese ones is found; (2) Although demonstrative references are used in similar frequency in both English and Chinese RA abstracts, their cohesive functions show quite a few differences. (3) More...