A Contrastive Genre Analysis Of Abstracts-A Case Study Of Translation Journals

As the globalization of academic research accelerates and the internationalacademic dialogues deepen, most academic journals in China require their contributorsto provide English abstracts. The communicative purpose of the abstract as a writtengenre is to generalize or summarize the content of the whole research article. Byintroducing the content of the research, the abstract serves to communicate theauthors’ latest research findings to the academic circle as a time-saving device.However, abstracts continue to be a neglected field among discourse analysis.The present study attempts to make a contrastive survey between IEAs (Englishabstracts of international translation journals) and CEAs (English abstracts of Chinesetranslation journals) from a generic perspective based on a corpus of100abstracts.Bruce’s four-move pattern of I-M-R-D was used to examine the macro-structure of theabstracts. At the micro-linguistic level, linguistic features including the length, theusage of tense, modal verb, and first personal pronoun are investigated.The findings show that, while both generic structure of the IEAs and CEAs are,by and large, in consistence with the IMRD model, significant differences are alsoobserved. The IEAs follow the widely-held I-M-R-D format more closely. As to thelinguistic features, the IEAs are composed with higher frequency of first personalpronoun and with more diversity of choice of tense and modal verb than those inCEAs.It is hoped that this study will contribute understanding to this particular genreand shed light on abstract translation and writing...