A Contrastive Analysis For Chinese Paratactic Sentences And Functionally Equal Sentences In English Research Articles

Research article (RA) is a major form to publicize researchers' findings in a certain field. Among the international community of scholars, English has long been accepted as the medium language in writing RAs. Teaching and learning skills in writing RAs are of high importance both at home and abroad. In China, the teaching and learning of academic writing in English have attracted much attention in recent years. Studies on RA can be traced back to the 1970s, and fruitful findings have been revealed, for example, RA structure Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion (IMRD) put forward by Swales, grammatical features of RA researched by various scholars, etc. Studies on the functional sentences in RA under the framework of cohesion principles are still inadequate, especially the contrastive study between English RAs and Chinese RAs.In this paper,60 pieces of Chinese and 60 pieces of English discourse from RAs were selected from major academic journals and the cohesion principles of each piece were examined. The different function discourse was treated separately and the frequency of cohesion principles in each discourse was compared and contrasted between Chinese and English RAs. The results show that both similarities and differences exist. The main findings are stated as follows. In Introduction section of English and Chinese RAs, the similarity lies in the fact that the natural sequence principle and the reference principle are used, and the difference is embodied in the redundancy principle and the shared knowledge ellipsis principle. In Materials and Methods section of English and Chinese RAs, the similarity lies in the fact that the consistency principle and the natural sequence principle are highly used, and the difference is embodied in the blockage principle, reference principle and the shared knowledge ellipsis principle. For the similarities, Chinese researchers can follow the principles in Chinese RAs when writing English RAs. For the differences, Chinese researchers need to adjust the principles in Chinese RAs in order to conform to the requirements when writing English RAs...