| In today's competitive academic world, scientists in academic discourse communities are characterized by the wish to communicate new knowledge to the other members of that community. Therefore, the pressure to publish is continually increasing and, in order to justify publication, the writers of scientific texts have to indicate a knowledge gap in reference to previously published work and create a research space that allows them to present new knowledge claims to the other members of the discourse community. This implies the use of a number of rhetorical strategies which involve the criticism of members of their own academic community. This thesis attempts to make some exploration in the interpersonal pragmatic phenomenon of academic criticism from a cross-linguistic perspective in research article abstracts.Since 1970s, the focus in stylistics, text linguistics and discourse analysis has shifted from a surface-layered description of the lexical and syntactical features or formats of discourse to a deeper and multi-layered explanation of the macrostructures and communicative functions of discourse, and thus genre analysis emerges and becomes an important branch of discourse analysis. Genre is a class of communicative events classified in light of a shared set of communicative purposes. There is one academic genre, the research article abstract, which has the main function of serving as a time-saving device by informing the readers about the exact content of the article, indicating in this way whether the full text merits their further attention. This genre has aroused great interest and become a focus of concern for many researchers.This study attempts to contribute to this area of research by analyzing the phenomenon of academic criticism from a crosslinguistic perspective (English and Chinese) in the research article abstract, an academic genre that has thus far been neglected from this point of view. A second motive for the work reported is that...
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