A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On Abstract Of Research Articles In International And Chinese English Scientific Journals

In recent years, with the fast development of science and technology and the wider communication with the international academic community, an increasing number of English scientific journals are issued in China. However, according to the Comprehensive Catalog of Chinese Core Journals, among nearly 200 Chinese English scientific journals nowadays in China, only a few are indexed by some well-known retrieval systems such as Science Citation Index (SCI) and Engineering Index (EI). As for the reason, we cannot neglect one of the most important criteria which are closely related to the acceptation, publication as well as retrieval of the research articles (RAs), that is, the abstract. As a mini version of RA, the quality of abstract can directly lead to the final judgment of the whole research paper. And the most basic problems which are also of great importance to abstract writing should lie in the language as well as the structure. However, Chinese college students and scientific researchers still have considerable difficulties in English abstract writing. Besides, there exist different viewpoints as to the English abstract writing for RA and the related contrastive studies on English abstract between native speakers of English (NSE) and Chinese learners of English (CLE) are quite insufficient. In order to find out the differences and gaps between CLE and NSE in abstract writing so as to help Chinese college students and scientific researchers with their abstract writing better, we assume it will be of great significance to conduct a contrastive study on English abstract written by CLE and NSE in Chinese English scientific journals (CESJ) and international English scientific journals (IESJ).This research aims to study the similarities and differences in English abstracts in both CESJ and IESJ from the following four aspects: graphological features, moves, thematic structures and linguistic features, and tries to find out the possible causes.With a corpus-based approach, two separate corpora of 200 English abstracts from both CESJ and IESJ are collected (around 27,054 words in total). As a whole, this thesis is a combination of quantitative and qualitative study. Move length, move model, move frequency, theme distribution, thematic progression as well as linguistic features in terms of voice, tense and model verbs are all considered variables which will be analyzed accordingly. Generally, in each abstract, the total number of a certain variable is counted, with its proportion and frequency being calculated. In order to further dig into the similarities and differences between abstracts of CESJ and IESJ, Independent-samples T test is sometimes used to verify whether statistical difference is significant enough to distinguish the data of CESJ and IESJ from each other.Research findings suggest that both similarities and differences exist on the discoursal level and in certain linguistic features between CESJ and IESJ. On graphological level, significant differences occur in the abstract length and sentence number, with the abstracts by NSE outnumbering those by CLE in the aspects of total abstract length, total sentence number as well as average sentence length. As for the move analysis, considerable differences exist in Move 2 (Presenting the research) and Move 4 (Describing the results), with no statistical differences on the other moves. With regard to the thematic structure, unmarked themes between the two corpora statistically differ from each other. There is also certain relationship between abstracts by CLE and NSE in the frequently used themes in different categories. About the pattern of thematic progression, abstracts in CESJ and IESJ both have frequent use of linear pattern, with comparatively less parallel pattern in CESJ. On linguistic features, active voice and simple present tense abound in both corpora, and model verbs also appear more frequently, especially in IESJ. It is found that linguistic features to a great extent are closely associated with the moves.This thesis provides a relatively comprehensive description of the discoursal and linguistic similarities and differences of the abstracts in Chinese and international English scientific journals. The research findings are good reference for Chinese learners of English to writer better English abstract and thus having their RAs being more easily accepted by international academic discourse, for teachers in ESP to give better guidance and suggestions in scientific writing and for editors of Chinese English scientific journals to examine RAs they receive in a more international-standard-approaching way.