The Relation Between Instrument-Achievement And Problem-Solution Pattern In Research Article Abstracts

The Problem-Solution has been studied by many researchers, among whom Hoeyhas studied the pattern from macro-perspective, Winter from the perspective of clauserelations, McCarthy the grammatical and lexical signals and Flowerdew with datafrom corpus. Hoey and McCarthy have studied the relation between Problem-Solutionpattern with the Instrument-Achievement relation, especially their realization throughlexical and grammatical signals. However, it still seems unclear if there is a relationbetween the two types of clause relations or in what way they are related. Hoeyfurther proposed an idea that: Cause-Consequence can be taken as the evidence of theexistence of a Problem-Solution pattern. This paper will start from this assumptionthat Instrument-Achievement relation exists as an evidence of Problem-Solution inresearch article abstracts.Research articles are an independent genre by themselves. However no effort hasbeen made to study the relation between the Problem-Solution pattern andInstrument-Achievement within this genre. To Second Language Learners, especiallyto the learners who will go on their further study, abstract writing poses them adifficult problem but sometimes it is regarded as a neglected field. This paper startsfrom analyzing the relation between Instrument-Achievement relation andProblem-Solution pattern within research article abstracts and its linguistic features.I hope the findings of this paper can help us in abstract writing and the result canprove or disprove Hoey’s claiming that "the relation between Problem and Responseis also one of the Cause-Consequence and that between Response and Result is alsoone of Instrument-Achievement".We have collected fifty abstracts randomly from SCI and SSCI. By analyzing theclause relations carefully, we found that the words signaling Instrument andAchievement relation, such as Vocabulary1, Vocabulary2and Vocabulary3proposedby Winter, demonstrate that this relation does exist but has its own features in usingwords in research article abstracts. From the linguistic perspective, the tense, voiceand modal verbs are examined and colligation and collocation of each element arealso summarized. And in the end, particular vocabularies of Instrument-Achievementand the Response and Result in Problem-Solution pattern are compared.The findings of this paper are that there is Instrument-Achievement relation in research article abstract and the Response-Result is displayed in the form ofInstrument-Achievement, but the existence of Instrument-Achievement relation is notthe evidence of the existence of Response-Result, that is to say, the existence ofInstrument-Achievement relation is not the evidence of the existence ofProblem-Solution pattern. So it is consistent with what Hoey said--Response andResult is also one of Instrument-Achievement is right within research article abstracts.The finding proves the relation holding between Instrument-Achievement andProblem-Solution but it is not so authoritative and exact. It also has some implicationson the composition, comprehension of research article abstracts. Moreover, as ateacher, we use the vocabulary summarized from this paper to help students writequalified abstracts.