Contrastive Research On The Frequency Of The Modal Adjunct Themes Based On The Corpus Of English Abstracts In Dissertations

The research of this thesis is a discourse analysis based on the theory of systemic-functional linguistics established by M.A.K Halliday. First, this study selects 200 English abstracts of theses randomly from China Doctor/Master Theses Full-text Databases, including 50 MA theses abstracts, 50 PhD theses abstracts written by students of Art major, and 50 MA theses abstracts, 50 PhD theses abstracts written by students of Engineering major, and thus sets up a mini corpus. Then, adapting the theory of modal adjunct theme of textual function, this thesis conducts a contrastive research on the frequency of modal adjunct themes based on a corpus of that 200 English abstracts in thesis.In order to ensure the reliability of the statistics result and the research conclusion, the present study makes a good use of the searching software AntConc3.2.1w. First, the frequency of the modal adjuncts are examined and analysed in terms of thematic structures. Then, they are categorized into different types as mood adjuncts and comment adjuncts for further contrastive study. Finally, these different adjuncts are analysed as a whole.Through such kind of analysis from the perspective of bottom-up, the present research analyses the use of modal adjunct themes in English abstracts of four different kinds of theses. The result shows that, generally speaking, the frequency of the modal adjunct theme is rather low. As for the contrast between abstracts of theses in different majors, students in art major tend to use more mood adjuncts than students in engineering major while the use of comment adjuncts is relatively similar between the two groups. When comparing different researching level in the same major, the present study finds that students in art major for doctor's degree tend to use more mood adjuncts and comment adjuncts than students in the same major for master's degree while students in engineering major for master's degree tend to use more mood adjuncts and students in engineering major for doctor's degree tend to use relatively more comment adjuncts. On the basis of the findings above, the present thesis also analyses the possible reasons for it, attempting to provide reasonable suggestions on the use of modal adjunct themes in the writing of abstract in thesis.