A Contrastive Study Of Comment Adjuncts In Academic Texts

Comment Adjunct is an important expressive means in academic texts, which is used to help the writers to express their views, attitudes or valuable judgments towards a proposition. Academic text is the place where the researchers expound academic views and exchange the research results, which plays an important role in scientific and technological progress. Thus how to make the language used in academic texts objectively and acceptably seems to be very important for most writers of academic texts. The Comment Adjuncts are usually used as a device to convey the writer’s attitudes, opinions and feelings about the whole proposition or part of the proposition, which has become a prominent feature of academic texts. However, academic texts are composed of many different types of sub-genres, so the uses of the Comment Adjuncts in these academic texts are also different. This research will investigate and analyze the Comment Adjuncts in three genres of academic texts, namely Research Article, Book Review and Review Article. Because these three genres all belong to academic texts, they have some similarities and differences in the aspect of the usage of the Comment Adjuncts.The theoretical basis for this research is Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Linguistics. Halliday firstly put forward the concept of the Comment Adjunct in1994and then in2004he and Matthiessen improve this concept again, who divide the Comment Adjuncts into two types:1) the prepositional (ideational) type;2) the speech functional (interpersonal) type. The reasons for selecting Halliday’s theory as the theoretical basis for this research are that its system is more precise and more suitable to embody the multi-semantic features and functions of the Comment Adjuncts. In addition, such a system only includes adverb phrases, preposition phrases and noun phrases instead of adjective phrases and some non-finite or finite clauses, so it is more suitable for analyzing discourses.All of the raw materials are from the self-made corpus. The academic texts in this corpus are selected from four journals:Journal of pragmatics. Lingua, Brain&Language and Communication Disorder. In order to make the research results more accurate and scientific, all the texts are limited to the linguistic discipline. By comparing the regularities and the functions of the Comment Adjuncts in these three genres, this research aims to explore:1) deeply understanding the Comment Adjuncts in order to help the writers to select proper expressions of the Comment Adjuncts in their academic texts;2) distinguishing the similarities and the differences of the usage of the Comment Adjuncts in these three genres;3) further investigating the interpersonal meanings that the Comment Adjuncts expresses. At last, this research gains the following results:1) the main types of the Comment Adjuncts appearing in these three genres are the same, but the specific frequency of the Comment Adjuncts in each genre is different. Book Review uses the largest number of the Comment Adjuncts and Research Article uses less Comment Adjuncts. Review Article is the genre in which the Comment Adjuncts are used least frequently;2) one of the functions that most Comment Adjuncts possess is to help the writers to get better communications with the readers for the purpose of expounding their views and attitudes on a proposition, furthermore, persuading the latter to accept their views and attitudes on the proposition. These results will be helpful for those who are interested in the use of the Comment Adjuncts in academic texts, especially for those who are willing to master the skills of writing academic texts, such as college teachers and students or researchers.