A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On Cohesive Devices In English Abstracts Of Academic Journals In English And Chinese

With the increasing international academic exchange, researches on Englishabstracts of academic journals have drawn more and more attention of the scholarsboth at home and abroad. The traditional studies mainly focused on the analysis ofgenre and style of native speakers’ abstracts, and researchers have seldom conductedcontrastive studies on the English abstract of academic journals written by Chinese andnative scholars from the aspect of textual cohesion. Cohesion, which is an importantway of endowing discourses with textuality, plays a significant role in the constructionof discourses, and meanwhile helps to organize the structure of text. English andChinese, which belong to different language systems, must be different from eachother in the mechanism of cohesion.Based on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) theory of cohesion, the study collects anumber of English abstracts of academic journals written by Chinese and nativescholars, establishes the corpora CSC and NSC, calculates and comparatively analyzesthe frequency of cohesive devices in the two corpora, and thus answers the followingquestions:(1) What are the differences in the use of cohesive devices in Englishabstracts of academic journals between Chinese scholars and native scholars?（2）What are the possible reasons for the differences in the use of cohesive devicesbetween Chinese scholars and native scholars?(3) What are the implications foracademic English writing?Through investigation, the findings can be summarized as follows:(1) in theEnglish abstract writing of academic journals, Chinese and native scholars share bothsimilarities and differences in the usage of cohesive devices; generally, compared withnative scholars, Chinese scholars employ less cohesive devices; they underuse somecohesive devices while overuse others;(2) the reasons of the differences in the use ofcohesive devices in English abstracts: a lack of style consciousness, insufficientunderstanding of cohesive words in semantic level and the negative transfer of native language;(3) when writing English abstracts of academic journals, Chinese scholarsshould comprehensively understand the meaning of cohesive words, prevent frombeing influenced by the negative transfer of native language, enhance the stylisticknowledge and fully consider the differences in cohesive devices between English andChinese, so as to improve the English abstract writing level of academic journals.The thesis is divided into five parts: Chapter one mainly introduces thebackground and purpose of the study. Chapter two is a literature review that willpresent the current researches about abstracts and the study of coherence done byscholars both at home and abroad, and systematically introduce the specificclassification of cohesive devices. Chapter three collects a number of English abstractsin English and Chinese academic journals, establishes corpora, poses the researchquestions and designs the research procedures. Chapter four respectively analyzes thegrammatical and lexical cohesion in the two corpora in detail so as to find thesimilarities and differences between Chinese and native scholars and investigates thecauses of these differences. Chapter five concludes the findings of this study, revealsthe enlightenment in English abstract writing, and introduces the limitations of thisresearch so as to provide some suggestions for the future researchers.