Investigation On The English Abstracts Of TCM Experimental Dissertations

The research is based on China English Corpus, a corpus development and retrieval platform that Dr Li Wenzhong led to have created in team effort. A sub-Corpus "The English Abstracts of TCM Experimental Dissertation" was constructed from the platform for the current research. As a result, altogether 540 pieces of English abstracts of TCM experimental dissertations are collected and prepared for analysis: 30 master's theses and 30 doctor's dissertations are sampled and retrieved each year from CNKI from 2000 to 2008.The research attempts to answer the following research questions: (1) What are common move names and the basic move-model; (2) What are linguistic features of each move text; (3) What are the features of clusters, from three to five words, in each move; (4) What are the core collocates, colligations, semantic preference and prosody of node notional verbs in each move, and common collocation structures of each move text. To answer the questions, the paper adopts Swales's concept of move to analyze the abstracts. First, a pilot study is undertaken to group and categorize the sequential moves in the abstracts. As the result, 5 major moves have been established. Then some linguistic features, such as use of tenses, voices, personal pronouns and modal verbs, are retrieved and analyzed for comparison. At the same time, there are still some errors, for example, students use a large number of modal verbs, like can and could, in writing the conclusions move texts. It could be caused by the negative transference of mother tongue. And some unique collocation structures are found in each move text.This paper studies the real writing situation of the English abstracts of TCM experimental dissertations, and provides some real data for teaching and studying. As feedback information, this study is of essential value to ESP and EAP teaching.