A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On Abstract Of Research Articles In English Economic And Management Papers Of Chinese And NSE Authors

This paper aims to compare abstracts of research articles in International and Chinese English Economic and Management Papers from the following aspects:graphological features, moves, thematic structures, and certain linguistic features. And it tries to find out the possible causes.The data were randomly selected from representative international journals and CNKI of Economic and Management Papers in international academic conferences, and each corpus contains35RA (research article) abstracts selected from SSCI. Santos’s(1996) move structure theory, Halliday’s (1985) thematic theory, Zhu yongsheng’s (2001) classification of thematic progression and statistical analysis methods were adopted to conduct the contrastive analysis of graphological features, move structures, thematic structures and certain linguistic features between International and Chinese English Economic and Management Papers.Research findings suggest that both similarities and differences exist on the discoursal level between International and Chinese English Economic and Management Papers. On the graphological level, significant differences occur in the abstract length and sentence number. As for the move analysis, considerable differences exist in Move2(Presenting the research) and Move4(Describing the results), with no statistical differences on the other moves. With regard to the thematic structure, unmarked themes and conjunctive themes between the two corpora statistically differ from each other. As for the patterns of thematic progression, frequent use of linear pattern and parallel pattern can be seen in both CEEMP (Chinese English Economic and Management Papers) and IEEMP (International English Economic and Management Papers). With regard to the linguistic features, active voice and the simple present tense appear a lot in both corpora, but model verbs appear more frequently in IEEMP. These differences to a large extent can influence the integrity of the structure of the abstract. Thus the abstract may fail to represent the mini version of the whole study. The findings can help Chinese scholars understand the general structure of the abstract accepted by international academic discourse more easily. And to some extent they help CSE (Chinese scholars of English) write standard abstracts.This study provides a relatively comprehensive comparison of the discoursal and linguistic similarities and differences of the abstracts in International and Chinese English Economic and Management Papers. The research findings are good references for Chinese scholars and also language learners to writer better English abstracts and thus to have their papers accepted by international academic discourse more easily, at the same time, it is very important for teachers in ESP (English for Specific Purposes) to give better suggestions in scientific abstract writing.