An Appraisal Analysis Of English Academic Article Abstracts In Journals Of Linguistics

An abstract can be viewed as a mini-version of the paper. Firstly, as an organic part of the academic papers, a well- prepared abstract enables readers to identify the basic content of a document quickly and accurately, to determine its relevance to their interests. As far as the abstract of the journal articles, it is one of the most important factors which determine whether the article can be employed, published and researched. Secondly, as a kind of textual organization form, abstract embodies certain communicative purpose and contains essential principles in text construction. In addition, for quite some time, academic language has been continually strived for objectivity and accuracy, avoided and eliminated the fuzziness and subjectivity of language to the greatest extent. However, the ultimate purpose of the academic articles is to promote your own research findings and enhance academic exchanges. So it is inevitable that academic language has evaluative and interpersonal function. At present, however, few researches have done on the appraisal analysis of English academic article abstracts. Based on these factors, the aim of this study is to analyze the distribution and interpersonal function of Appraisal Resources in English academic article abstracts. In this study, both quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted to analyze a corpus of 40 academic abstracts written in English which are collected from four kinds of core international journals of English linguistics namely Applied Linguistics, English Language Teaching Journal, Journal of English Linguistics and Journal of Pragmatics. They are published by famous publishing houses such as Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. 10 abstracts from each journal were randomly selected from the items under'Articles'category and they were all published in 2008. In general, three questions are expected to be answered in the present study:1) How are these Appraisal Resources distributed in English academic article abstracts? 2) How are these Appraisal Resources adopted by academic writers to achieve the interpersonal goals?3) Is there any inconsistency between the Subjectivity of Appraisal Resources and the objectivity of academic abstracts?The result shows that the evaluative resources run through the whole process of article abstracts. The writers adopt multiple Appraisal Resources in writing AA abstracts and there is a considerable variation of the distribution of the three subsystems in abstracts.It proves that there is no conflict between subjectivity of Appraisal Resources and the objectivity of academic abstracts and the nature of abstract can be said to be persuasion, consultation and assessment. It is hoped that findings in this thesis could offer some effective strategies for abstract writing and teaching.