Contrastive Study On Thematic Choice And Textual Cohesion In Technical English Abstracts By English And Chinese Authors

As present academic communication goes far beyond national borders, international publication or indexation has become a major reference for evaluating the academic importance of technical researches. English abstract plays a key role in the assessment of research papers by international indexation systems like EI (American Engineering Information) and SCI (Science Citation Index). However, due to limited English writing ability, inadequate understanding of international editing requirements and lack of corresponding instructions, many Chinese researchers have difficulty in writing qualified English abstracts and therefore lose chances for international academic communication.In order to deepen the understanding of differences between technical English abstracts written by Chinese and native scholars, and find out problems in the abstracts of Chinese writers, the author has conducted a comparative study on the basis of EI's requirements for technical abstract writing. First, a corpus of 60 English abstracts for technical papers, the half from American Engineering Information website written by native writers and the other half from Wanfang Thesis Databank website by Chinese writers, have been chosen by random selection and set as samples for analysis. What is new in this paper is that the author combines the thematic theory and textual cohesion. Detailed information is acquired by contrasting and comparing these selected samples from both the thematic features and textual cohesions. From the two perspectives, the contrast and comparison focuse on: (1) the contrast of thematic features by theme types, the markedness of themes, and the thematic patterns; (2) the contrast of textual cohesions by theme-rheme repetition, metaphoric themes and usage of connectors.Different from the anticipated result, the statistics shows that the Chinese writers and native writers share insignificant difference in thematic patterns. Though Chinese writers of English write almost as well as their English counterparts in terms of thematic patterns, they do not write idiomatically. The problems existing in the Chinese writers' writing of English abstracts are further investigated. The research finds that Chinese writers of technical English abstracts do have more room for the improvement of their ways to abstract writing in terms of theme-rheme repetition, metaphoric themes and usage of connectors. Those findings will be helpful for future research and for Chinese scholars who need to improve their technical abstract writing.