A Contrastive Study Of The Discourse Features Of China English In Abstract Writings From A Cultural Perspective

English, as an international language, has been widely used in the academic settings. Most international journals are published in English, which is a challenge for Chinese scholars. According to statistics, the amount of Chinese scholars' publications on the international journals has been increasing year by year, and plays a crucial role in the global academic exchange. This fact, to some extent, has proved that China English has been accepted by the foreign academic circles.The research taking abstracts as study subjects aims to investigate the discourse features of China English in academic writings. In this thesis, sixty abstracts are selected manually from the Web of Science databases, and subdivided into three corpora based on the writers' mother tongue and the languages they used for writings, respectively: China English abstracts, Chinese abstracts and normative English abstracts. With the help of selected corpora, the study conducts a contrastive analysis of the choices of markedness of theme and frequency of five thematic progression patterns of China English abstracts, Chinese abstracts and English natives' abstracts based on the theory of Halliday's theme-rheme structure and Danes' Thematic Progression Patterns. Then the study generalizes China English's preference on themes and TP (Thematic Progression) patterns. At last, further discussions on its generative mechanism are conducted from a cultural perspective.The results indicate that 1) China English abstracts use many marked theme and place semantic elements at the beginning of the clauses by the time sequence. Scholars seldom use conjunctions to achieve the formal coherence. 2) Although five TP patterns have all been used, they differ greatly in the frequency. Within two to four sentences scope, China English abstracts often continuously use simply linear progression patterns or patterns with continuous themes in a linear way, while beyond the micro-level, Chinese scientists also frequently adopt patterns with intersective themes and discontinuous themes for the text development. Therefore, the TP on the whole leads to a spiral organization. China English is influenced by both English and Chinese, but it has more similarities with Chinese discourses, which reflects the characteristics of indirectness and comprehensiveness and perception in Chinese traditional culture. China English is an inevitable outcome due to the language contact. It is closely related to the influence of Chinese culture and the thought pattern.