An Analysis Of The Clause Relations In Abstracts Of Social Science Journal Articles

As a genre, abstract has its own features and ways of text organization. Many ofthe researches on textual organization are about the global structures or moves ofabstracts, as can be seen from the two most popular textual organizations or rhetoricalpatterns, which are Problem-Solution pattern proposed by Hoey (1983) for global textorganization and the IMRD pattern (Introduction—Method—Results—Discussion)proposed by Salvager-Meyer (1990) for journal article abstracts. However, fewresearches have inquired into the clause relations of abstracts. Clause relations can takeplace on various levels of a text s structure. When combined together, certain clauserelations constitute discourse patterns (McCarthy,1990; Hoey, l983), or rhetoricalstructure (Mann&Thompson1978), or moves (quoted from Yang Yuchen,2011).Therefore, the following questions are put forward in the present research:(1) What types of clause relations exist in English abstracts of journal articles(hereinafter referred as JAs) for social science studies?(2) What are the most frequent clause relations?(3) What is the typical rhetorical pattern based on clause relation in Englishabstracts of JAs on social sciences?Based on quantitative study and qualitative study, this research attempts toexamine the clause relations of English journal article abstracts on the level aboveclauses, employing the theory of clause relations proposed by Winter (1971) and Hoey(1983) as well as the RST framework proposed by Mann and Thompson (1978). Itaims to find out the frequently-used clause relations in English journal article abstractsand rhetorical patterns based on clause relations in them.The present study examines the identification of clause relations and theapplication of rhetorical patterns in journal articles on social science abstracts. Beforestudying the clausal and rhetorical relations, the linguistic signals are looked into,adopting the three Vocabulary classification of Winter (1977), which is within the framework of the Clause Relational approach. The present research is carried out inthree procedures: the identification of clause relation signals, the use of the ClauseRelational approach to analyze the SSCI abstract corpus, and the application of RST tostudy the same corpus.Theoretically, the research is an attempt to apply the clause relation theory to thestudy of English journal article abstracts and hopefully it can provide some insight intothe system of genre study. In application, the findings of the research can be applied tothe writing of abstracts in English for researchers and the translation of abstracts bothfrom English to Chinese and from Chinese to English.