| The comparison and contrast of Chinese and English discourse patterns havebecome an important research direction in contrastive rhetoric. Chinese and Englishhave their own conventions in the construction of discourse. Hoey (1983) notes thatthe Problem-Solution pattern is the most commonly used discourse pattern in English.Meanwhile, the qi-cheng-zhuan-he pattern is widely employed to account for theorganization of Chinese discourse. However, the comparative analysis of the twodiscourse pattern has not aroused much interest. There are even few studies conductedto compare the patterns in English and Chinese research article abstracts.To investigate the compatibility of the Problem-Solution pattern and theqi-cheng-zhuan-he pattern, the research is carried out from two aspects. TheProblem-Solution pattern is not only applicable to analyze English research articleabstracts, but also workable to analyze Chinese research article abstracts written in theqi-cheng-zhuan-he pattern. Besides, the comparative analysis of the two discoursepatterns is conducted to account for their relationship.This thesis is concerned with the comparative study of two discourse patternsbased on two corpora that consist of30English and30Chinese research articleabstracts respectively related to the field of linguistics. The statistical methods wereemployed to find similarities and differences in the two patterns. The results indicatethat the Problem-Solution pattern is applicable to the analysis of English and Chineseresearch article abstracts. The two discourse patterns tend to be regarded as twovarieties of the same rhetorical convention.The findings will provide implications for the study on Chinese students’motivation in writing and practical statistical methods for the research on thecomparative analysis of discourse patterns in English and Chinese research articleabstracts. |
PDF Full Text Request