A Hallidayan Approach To Textual Coherence Of Research Paper Abstracts

English abstracts, as an indispensable part of academic papers, play an important role in the current rapid development of international cultural exchanges. Serving as an exact and concise summary of the source research paper, an abstract enjoys distinctive social functions, linguistic features and discourse structure. The current research paper aims to explore textual coherence of research paper abstracts from the functional perspective. We provide an adapted theoretical framework based on Halliday's cohesion theory, the textual function of his three metafunctions of language, and Hasan's notion of generic structural potential (GSP).This thesis argues that textual coherence of research paper abstracts is mainly realized in macro and micro aspects. Macro coherence focuses on appropriate generic structure of abstracts, which is in accordance with the requirement of register consistence to achieve global coherence. Micro coherence is manifested in various cohesive semantic relations at lexico-grammatical and clausal levels. These cohesive relations are co-constructed by means of the three textual components: cohesive devices, thematic structure and information structure. To test this hypothetic coherence framework, a detailed data analysis of 40 randomly selected linguistic research paper abstracts is carried out. The results prove to be feasible and powerful in explaining textual coherence of abstracts texts. Meanwhile, the findings provide some valuable pedagogical implications for teaching abstracts writing to raise students'coherence awareness and guidance on teaching reading to help students achieve effective and thorough comprehension of written texts.