| In this study, we chose60English abstracts of research papers from famous medical journals, applied genre analysis into the comparison and analysis of their structural and linguistic features in two periods1997-2001and2009-2013to explore the basic features of the English abstracts of medical RAs, as well as the differences in English abstracts of medical research between different periods and reasons. This study studies the following questions:1) What are the possible structural changes of the English medical abstracts?2) What are the possible linguistic changes of the English medical abstracts?3) What implications can this study give to ESP teaching and learning?The conclusion is that:within English medical abstracts,1) the Introduction, Methods, Results and Conclusion are considered as sequential obligatory moves, while the Aim section is considered as an optional move;2) such linguistic features as hedging devices, verb voices, tenses and the first personal pronouns are closely related to the theoretical functions of each move in an abstract and the closer their relations are, the higher the frequency of their occurrences will be;3) the structures and linguistic features of the English medical abstracts are function-related and different communicative functions need to be realized through different structures and languages;4) the differences of the two corpora on the aspects of language, structure and characteristics indicate that writing an abstract of medical RA is influenced by the writers’ ethnic cultural thought pattern, language proficiency and language transfer from the mother tongue etc. |
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