The Study Of Theme On Doctoral Dissertation English Abstract In Engineering

As an exact and concise summary of the source article, abstract continues to grow in importance. In recent years, there is an increasing interest in the study of the genre of abstract. This paper discusses the structural organization of a particular genre, paper abstract. The author attempts to establish a small corpus of 50 abstracts, which are written by native Chinese doctors whose majors belong to engineering. The abstracts are selected from those submitted doctoral dissertations of engineering in CNKI. Based on the Theme theory of Halliday, the author divides the each clause of the abstracts into Theme-Rheme, and then studies the theme characteristics of abstracts, including the types, functions, informativeness, markedness and clause relationship of the theme.This thesis begins with a brief discussion of previous research on abstract and summarizes their achievements, which aims to present the literature review of the paper. Then, the author of the thesis makes a clarification of the data collection and the procedures of the research. After the whole abstracts in the corpus have been marked for three times, the author sends the samples into computer. By means of AntConc (Version 3.2.1), the data we need will receive. Then, a large space of the thesis is devoted to the manifestation of the generic structure and the textual organization of the English abstracts. The analysis of the abstract includes five aspects, the theme types, the theme functions, the informativeness, the markedness of theme and the clausal relationship.The results shows the ratio of simple theme is the largest one in the three types of theme, more than sixty percentage, while the clausal theme is less than ten percentage; the experimental theme are much more than interpersonal theme and textual theme; the unmarked theme and old information in the theme occupied; and the percentage of the extension in the clausal relationship is over seventy. From the research of the four aspects, it is obvious to show the characteristics of the genre of the abstract, as well as the characteristics of the discipline of engineering in doctoral dissertation. In a word, all the data and results further prove that the English abstracts of doctoral dissertation in engineering are clear, concise and informative.It is hoped that the current research regarding English abstract can enrich genre study and enlarge the corpus of abstract. What's more, it should be beneficial to English abstract writing for other scientific and technical papers. At last, the author hopes that the present study could be incorporated into the language learning classroom and would help especially those students who are learning to write academic papers.