A Corpus-based Comparative Study On English Abstracts Of Chinese And American Economics Doctorial Dissertations From The Perspective Of Stylistics

English abstract as a necessary component in research paper has played an essential role in attracting the readers to go through the whole paper either to make it accepted or published. The Chinese scholars apart from those majoring in English always find themselves in a difficult situation when they are writing their English abstracts. The present thesis is directed to enable non-native speakers of English to write their abstracts in a way with higher degree of accuracy and fluency through the comparative study on English abstracts of finance and economics doctoral dissertations form the perspective of stylistics. To be specific, two sub-corpora are established in this study, the first contains50domestic English abstracts of doctoral dissertations in the field of finance and economics, in which35of them are from South Western University of Finance and Economics (SWUFE) and the other15from Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE), the word count of this corpus is58,623and all of them are from Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). The other sub-corpus also contains50English abstracts and they are abstracts of doctoral dissertations in the field of finance and economics from31different American universities. The word count of this sub-corpus is20,373and all of them are from ProQuest Dissertations and These (PQDT). Considering the size of the corpus and the uniqueness of major to be studied, this paper is not going to analyze all the100abstracts in each chapter, instead,20abstracts are randomly chosen from each sub-corpus, the word counts are20,154and8,467respectively, to study and to acquire some recapitulative results. Based on the basic research approach of stylistics and through comparative study of both sub-corpora from different aspects, the present thesis found:As a type of scientific English, abstracts are restricted by various criterions for authors from different countries (language systems), such as the requirement of word count, domestic abstracts are mostly translated from Chinese version and the average word count is1000, which is about three times more than that of the western scholars. The thematic progression patterns of the Chinese and foreign scholars are quite different from each other. The move structures of both sub-corpora differentiate from each other in a lot of ways, the most apparent one is that domestic scholars use more moves and they tend to use moves such as "Introduction to Each Chapter"(IEC) and "Key Words" which foreign doctors never use. The similarity’lies in that they share the same obligatory moves and the occurrence sequence is mostly identical. Viewing from the micro level, the present study also shows:foreign scholars are more tactful in the wording of research finding move, they use much less predicative modal verbs such as "can" and "will" and more numerals in demonstration, these are the aspects that we Chinese scholars should learn from our counterparts; Chinese doctors are more careful in the use of acronyms and abbreviations, and some foreigners even coin acronym words that has never been used before. Little differences were found in the use of tense and aspects for both sub-corpora and the most preferred tense and voice are simple present and the active voice.