| In the great new era of information, the scientific researchers publish research papers (RPs) in scientific journals to disseminate that information to the larger community of scientists, and read RPs to master the developing of a specific research field. No wonder RP becomes more and more important.The present study focuses on the titles and abstracts of research papers. As we all know, the title and abstract is at the first beginning of a paper, and they are an important content in any retrieval database. Standardized writing of titles and abstracts for scientific research papers in English will be helpful for the international exchange of science and technology, hence to extend the influence of scientific and technological achievements in the world. Though only occupying a small part of a paper, the RP title and abstract in English is of great significance as it can directly influence whether the research findings can be world-widely spread and exchanged. Meanwhile, some important international research organizations such as American Engineering Information will judge if a research paper can be embodied into their database through reading its English abstract.However, some English RPs written by Chinese researchers are rejected because of the problems for language or structure of their papers. And therefore, the primary goal of this research is to find out the authentic prototype of RP titles and abstracts, explore the language coding in title and abstract writing and facilitate Chinese writers with producing a well-written English title and abstract for a research paper.The general research questions to be addressed in the study will be as follows: Does the prototype theory have the power to explain the RP titles and abstracts? Is it possible, in fact, to extract characteristic features of RP titles and abstracts? How are English abstracts written by Native English-speaking (NES) writers and Chinese writers different from each other? In what aspects are they different and similar? To seek the answer, the present research looks at this question on an empirical basis by examining titles and abstracts from research papers in computer science. In this research, we have discussed the general structure and characteristics of titles and abstracts written by researchers with different writing levels from the perspectives of the language's surface and deep structures, exploring the cognitive prototype in the process of abstract writing.A comparative study between RP titles and abstracts by NES writers and Chinese writers is conducted in the present research. A corpus of 120 English RP titles and abstracts in the discipline of computer science is built in the present study. All of these papers were published or finished after 2006. The corpus consists of 4 subcorpora, each of which contains the titles and abstracts of 30 papers published or finished in 2006. All the materials are randomly selected. Subcorpus 1 consists of the titles and abstracts of SCI high-cited papers written by Native English-speaking (NES) writers and published. Subcorpus 2 is composed of materials selected from the core periodicals in the CNKI. The materials in Subcorpus 3 are selected from the non-core periodicals in the CNKI. Subcorpus 4 consists of the English titles and abstracts of 30 unpublished papers written by postgraduate and doctoral students who major in computer science from National University of Defense Technology (NUDT). The comprehensively comparative study using prototype theory from the language's surface and deep structures between the 4 corpora is presented in this study. The structures and compositions of RP English titles are analyzed at first. Then, the structural moves of abstracts are compared across the four subcorpora. At last, linguistic features as modal verbs, first person pronoun, tense and voice are studied in detail.The results of the present research show that, after all the qualitative and quantitive analysis are finished, there are significant differences between the abstracts written by NES writers and Chinese writers. The titles and abstracts chosen from CP is much closer to the prototype of NES writers than that chosen from NCP, while the samples written by the students from NUDT have many special characteristics which are different from the two subcorpora, namely, CP and NCP subcorpus.The structure of RP titles written by NES and Chinese writers are similar to each other, however, the latter are very hidebound compared to the former. Chinese writers always choose the uni-head nominal group with preposition phrase post-modifier and some abstract words such as "Design of..." and "Research on", which made the titles can not indicate the specific topic of their research. And the pattern of "...based on..." has become inundant in the titles written by Chinese writers. These kinds of titles can not attract readers' attention in the first time.As to the abstracts, most of English titles and abstracts written by Chinese writers are found to be featured by incomplete content, over-simplified statements, and monotonous language expression, compared with abstracts by NES writers. English RP abstracts written by Chinese writers are not very close to the prototype of NES abstracts. CP abstracts is better than NCP abstracts. The abstracts written by NUDT students are better than CP abstracts from the language level, but worse than CP abstracts from the construction level.What is notable and creative in the thesis is that it is the first time to conduct an empirical quantitative study on contrasting and comparing a great number of scientific abstracts in English written by native and Chinese writers; and then prototype theory is used tentatively for the first time to explain the differences existing between NES writers and Chinese writers. Moreover, the results of the study represent the comprehensive status in quo of English academic writing level for the Chinese researchers. Last but not least, in the previous studies of titles and abstracts, the analysis is mainly related to the language's surface structure (namely, grammar, vocabulary etc.). While in this thesis, abstracts are going to be investigated not only from the surface structure, but also from the deep structure (that is moves and cohesion in the abstracts).
|
PDF Full Text Request