| Research abstracts as academic achievements play an important role in helping scholars to access the world's leading Hi-Tech and promoting international cutting-edge academic exchange and research. Abstracts, as the epitome of the research papers, not only enable the readers to obtain the necessary information in the shortest time, but also enhance computer searching and the probability of being cited. Therefore, it is necessary to pore over the genre analysis of English abstracts in research articles.This thesis will be carried out from two perspectives based on the ESP (English for specific purposes) genre analysis: macro-genre structure and micro-linguistic features. The macro-genre structure is examined by adopting the five-move system put forward by Ge Dongmei (2002), which refer to move 1 (Providing Background Information), move 2 (Announcing Present Work), move 3 (Describing Methodology), move 4 (Presenting Findings) and move 5 (Drawing Conclusions). Micro-linguistic features mainly focus on checking the features such as the use of modal verbs, tenses, voice and first person pronouns. The purpose is to sum up the genre structure and linguistic features of English abstracts of research articles across three disciplines and the similarities and discrepancies among them by using chi-square test in order to provide reference for teaching and publication of papers.The corpus established here contains 300 abstracts involving three disciplines: linguistics, medicine and compute science. Each discipline has 100 abstracts excerpted from 10 journals of linguistics in SSCI and 10 journals of medicine and computer science in SCI respectively.The findings are listed in the following.1. In macro-genre structure analysis, the difference between medicine and computer science is significant (P<0.005). The generic structures between linguistics and medicine have no statistically significant differences (P>0.05). The same is true for those between linguistics and computer science (P>0.05). The genre structures in linguistics and computer science are influenced by moves of communicational function, however, that in medicine is not (P>0.1). In 300 abstracts, 87.7% abstracts occur at a fixed sequence of moves, a minority of abstracts (10%) are reversed in order, the remaining part (2.3%) occur in cyclical order.2. In micro-linguistic features analysis, the use of modal verbs has relation to disciplines (df=4,P<0.005) and to the moves for df=4, P<0.05. The present tense is always preferred in the selection of tenses across disciplines, the option of tenses not only varies from discipline to discipline (df=36, P<0.05) but also from move to move (df=6, P<0.05). The choice of voice contradicts the description about the use of voice in research article writing books. The result shows that the active voice is prevalently chosen across disciplines except move 3 (describing the methodology) in medicine and computer science, the differences of the choice of voices among the three disciplines are obvious, which is influenced not only by disciplines but also by moves (df=1, P<0.005). The option of the first person pronouns is closely related to the disciplines (P<0.05).This thesis not only enriches the contents of writing course, but also provides research article writings with very important reference value for graduates; the findings will exert influence on the development of international academic exchange and cooperation and improve the article publication rate in distinguished international journals for scholars in China. |
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