A Stylistic Analysis Of English Academic Papers Based On Corpus

It is a hot tendency to analyze academic papers from the perspective of stylistics in the recent 20 years in English study. Being a formal style, academic paper has its own stylistic features in grammar, vocabulary, etc. As Firth(1957), a famous British linguistist, puts it, "A restricted language serves a circumscribed field of experience or action and can be said to have its own grammar and dictionary." This thesis analyzes academic papers comprehensively from the perspective of stylistics based-on some corpus linguistics.Corpus is an electronically stored collection of samples of naturally occurring language. It makes the academic papers analysis to be more objective, scientific and intuitional. Corpus linguistics can be regarded as a sophisticated and available method of finding answers to those kinds of questions linguists have always asked. A large corpus can be used to add a quantitative dimension to many linguistic studies. The general and systematic analysis and observation avoid limitations caused by subjectivity and artificial factors. The stylistic characteristics of academic paper are due to the differences of subject. This thesis has chosen 30 engineering and art English academic papers from international journal works. AntConc software was also used to help analyzing the data so as to achieve a more scientific result. Thus, this paper is providing an opportunity to probe into this prevalent cultural force and analyze it in a more quantitative way. The paper tries to analyze those theses from lexical level, syntactic/grammatical level, semantic levels and textual analysis of academic papers. Findings show that there are some differences between of ECEAP and ACEAP. To be specific, both of them use nonrefering "it" on the lexical level and conjunctions on the textual level frequently. ECEAP involve many abbreviation professional terms on the lexical level and use more complex and compound sentences in sentence patterns, while of ACEAP present more simple sentence. The author hopes that the thesis might enlighten those scientific researchers who want to peruse and compose academic papers correctly, quickly and effectively.