English Research Article Titles In Chinese And International Journals: Structural And Informational Perspectives

The thesis focuses on the contrastive study of the syntactic and informational structures of the English-language research article titles composed by contributors to international and local Chinese linguistics journals.The research is genre-based and empirical.All together over 2000 research article titles were collected from nine leading international journals and eight Chinese key journals in the area of linguistics and applied linguistics.The samples were examined in terms of syntactic structure as well as information structure.The results show significant differences between the two groups of titles in terms of title length, structure,punctuation usage and preposition distributions.Generally speaking,the results show that the two groups of titles differ significantly:the most preferred title pattern for international writers is the compound title,but the dominant pattern in the Chinese corpus is the noun phrase title.The titles in Chinese journals are more complex than those in international journals,both structurally and semantically. Chinese linguists have also been found using much more prepositional phrases in almost all types of title,but much fewer compound title types.Furthermore,stark contrasts are found between the two groups of titles in use of initial on-title and A(...) study/analysis of construction.The study is expected to contribute to the cross-cultural studies between Chinese and English academic discourse and to be helpful to Chinese(and other nonnative) writers who seek availability in international journals.