Evaluation In Abstracts: A Contrastive Study In Student And Published Writing

It is an old tradition that scientific and scholarly writing needs to be objective, neutral and author-evacuated but this view has been challenged for at least two decades by a rapidly increasing number of researchers who focus their interest on the interpersonal instead of ideational character in academic discourses. Furthermore, many distinguished scholars concur that any successful academic writing could not be produced without arguments made with interpretive statements and subjective judgments in academic writing. However, studies on the interpersonal aspect of academic abstracts are few in China.Based on two corpora of 60 abstracts from L2 masters' theses and published journal articles in the field of English linguistics, this thesis tries to explore the occurrences, space occupation and functions of the evaluative resources in three major categories: evaluative events, evaluative sources and evaluative stance to look at how academic writers can manage the dual demands of persuasion and objectivity as well as what the possible variations are when these evaluative strategies are investigated in both students' and experts' abstracts.Analysis of evaluative events in abstracts shows that student writers prefer to highlight the background part, while expert writers spend more time and give more space to the two evaluative events: topic and product instead.Analysis of evaluative sources in abstracts shows that: more hidden evaluative sources are found in the Thesis Abstracts Corpus (TAC) than Journal Abstracts Corpus (JAC) in the form of passive voice in particular whereas expert writers favor attributing the evaluative source to themselves, macro-texts or micro-texts.Analysis of evaluative stance in abstracts shows that: both writers in JAC and TAC favor expressing their attitudes towards the propositions in an implicit way and most of them tend to employ low certainty expressions more frequently than high certainty expressions.This study sheds some new light on understanding the nature of academic abstracts and it provides novice or junior academic writers some useful evaluative strategies to produce their academic products successfully in an objectified subjective way. It also suggests that studying the real texts of experts in our own fields can help us to move beyond the descriptions of style guides to identify some useful evaluative strategies for them to produce successful academic research paper abstracts.