A Contrastive Study On Application Of Economy Principle In English Abstracts Of Research Papers For Science And Technology Written By Chinese And English Scholars

English of science and technology(EST) owns its unique stylistic features, and the importance of an English abstract playing in the research article reading and publication is indispensible, so it is valuable and helpful for Chinese scholars to understand and master the writing features in English abstracts of EST. One of its typical writing features is the application of Economy Principle, employing in the noun attributes, nominalization and non-finite (or infinite) verbs and so on. Nevertheless, there have been few studies on the application of Economy Principle in English abstracts of papers for science and technology so far, and even fewer papers of the comparative studies on the application of Economy Principle with self-built corpora.In this paper, the author adopts the method of random sampling and builds two copra herself and totally160English abstracts whose authors are Chinese scholars and English native scholars are obtained. Those abstracts belong to four disciplines. The corpora are tagged by the author herself so that she can count the frequency of noun attribute, nominalization and non-finite verb easily. In order to study the application of Economy Principle in the English abstracts, the frequency of noun attribute, nominalization and non-finite verb is identified and compared.The comparison of the frequency in the above three aspects between Chinese writers (CWs) and English native writers (ENWs) shows that, the frequency of the application of noun attributes, nominalization (not including those prepositional phrases with “of”) and non-finite verbs in the English abstracts of EST academic papers written by ENWs is higher than that in the English abstracts of EST academic papers written by CWs; in addition, the information contained in a simple sentence in the English abstracts of EST academic papers written by ENWs is greater than that in the English abstracts of EST academic papers written by CWs, demonstrating there truly exist differences in the application of Economy Principle between the English abstracts of research papers for science and technology written by ENWs and CWs which reflects in the aspects of noun attribute, nominalization (not including those prepositional phrases with “of”) and non-finite verb. And ENWs can apply the Economy Principle more flexibly and freely. Lastly, with the purpose of exploring the possible reasons causing those differences, the author carries out interviews in which12PhD candidates from5different universities in Nanjing are interviewed. Their answers have suggested that no acknowledgement on the Economy Principle and the differences between Chinese and English are important factors. Fruitful results have been achieved in the exploration of the use of Economy Principle in the English abstracts of academic research papers for science and technology and in corpus research, which also provide constructive suggestions for Chinese graduates or scholars, making them read and write the English abstracts of academic research papers for science and technology in their own fields more efficiently and easily.