The Study Of Theory Integration On Module Structure Annotation Of English Written Academic Discourse

Since the sixties and seventies in the twentieth century, the discourse analysis has profound impact on the traditional study of language, and the discourse analysis is increasingly attracting the attention of the scholars from different disciplines in many countries. In China, the study of discourse analysis not only has been carried out from the application of basic theories, such as systematic functional linguistic theory, genre analysis theory, but also has been given more emphasis on comparison of different linguistic and discourse features of academic texts in Chinese and English.At the same time, in modern well-developed scientific and informative society, corpus has been becoming a basic and effective tool of language research because of its variety of texts, easy operation and processing. Corpus annotation is the process of adding information to a corpus. So the annotation will bring the more vast development space for corpus construction and computer-assisted language teaching. The previous research concerning corpus focused on word collocation, sentence parsing and so on, while little research is on the structure of academic written discourse using ESP genres in corpus study.This study, based on our established corpus of academic genre, choosing nearly 1000 English texts as the subjects, integrates three theories to make module structure annotation of texts. The three theories are Mann &Thompson's (1987,1988) RST, Bhatia's (1993) genre analysis and Nattinger& DeCarrico's (1992) formulaic language. This study is mainly conducted to make key sentences annotation microscopically under the direction of formulaic language theory. At the same time, it is also conducted to make the move structure annotation of the text macroscopically under the direction of genre analysis theory. RST ensures the coherent and coherence of the study. The thesis mainly explains the integration process through the pilot study and the actual annotation as the focus.The results show that:1. Integrating the three theories is possible when they have mutual relationship on the study of texts or discourse. RST is used to analyze the coherent relations within texts, especially the relations between units and segments of the text, aiming to provide the formal framework for the language analysis and generation. Genre Analysis, the higher stage of discourse analysis, helps people understand the inner rule of discourse construction, the writing purposes of the author, and the communicative purposes and social functions of the text. And Formulaic Sequences Theory analyzes the text form the chunks, which are the smaller units for understanding the text easily.2. These three theories are integrated through the annotation. RST, the guiding ideology throughout the entire text annotation, ensures that the text and annotation mark or label could retain and keep their hierarchy. Genre analysis theory is used in a"top-down"perspective to find out the layout of academic texts and formulaic sequence theory is used in a"bottom-up"point to guide the detail annotation of the key sentences. In the process of study, the author first marked out the moves or steps of the whole text and then marked out the chunks within each moves or steps, and at last, the author analyzed and drew up the RST relationship between them.3. Based on the annotated module and chunks template, this study has developed a kind of software to make the writing easier and more convenient. This software has many functions such as searching, customizing, and translation. The use of the software can provide learners much convenience for writing the academic paper easily and professionally.This study is still in the tentative stage and has much follow-up work to do, such as the expansion of the quantity of academic written texts and annotators; the detailed classification of moves and chunks in the annotation; the application of RST tool in our self-made annotation software; and so on.The thesis contributes to the study of academic texts by applying some theories into the practical application of academic texts and at the same time enriches the study of annotation. This is a new perspective. And the significance of our research is that it is the combination of theory and practice. It will not only enrich the research content of text level of corpus, but at the same time establish a general template of academic writing as the basis of the module structure annotation. Our great help will make writers use more professional and normative language in academic writing.