A Study Of Thematic Progression Patterns Of The English Abstracts Of Academic Papers

Abstract is the brief summary part of a thesis. It highly concludes the maincontents of the thesis and also is the refining and enrichment. The United Nations’educational, scientific and cultural organization once stipulated that all the publishedpapers over the world, no matter written in which kind of language, should have aparagraph of abstract in the front. With the improvement of the quality of thescientific research of the scholars in China, more and more achievements of academicresearch are being published in the international journals. Academic papers havebecome an important platform of the communication between the scholars at homeand abroad. The abstract of an academic paper is a key factor that whether the papercould be employed, published and retrieved. Therefore, the importance of the Englishabstracts of academic papers cannot be ignored.Generally speaking, one can understand all the content of a discourse if he readsall the themes of each sentence. But he cannot get all the content of the paper byreading the themes of the abstract of the paper. While by analyzing the thematicprogression patterns and the semantic relationships of the abstract, one can know theinformation of the discourse clearly and comprehend its content exactly.This study takes Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar, the seven logicalsemantic relations of Xu Shenghuan and the six thematic progression patterns ofHuang Guowen as theoretical frameworks. The author collected thirty Englishabstracts of academic papers from the foreign magazines Science and Nature asresearch objects and analyzed the thematic progression patterns employed to find outthe most frequently used thematic progression patterns and study the application ofthematic progression patterns in English abstracts of academic papers.The aim of the research is to solve the following three questions:(1) What are the thematic progression patterns in the abstracts of Englishacademic papers?(2) Which kind of thematic progression patterns is preferred in the abstracts of English academic papers?(3) What are the implications of the research for the English abstract writing ofChinese academic papers?Both qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis are untilized in this study.Firstly, each clause of the abstracts in the corpus are divided and the clause arenumbered through the qualitative analysis. Secondly, the author identified the theme,rheme part, and then point out the employed thematic progression pattern of everyclause. By using the quantitative analysis, the total number of the clauses and thetimes that every thematic progression pattern occurred in one abstract sample arecalculated. Secondly, the author calculated the occurring frequency and the averageoccurring frequency of every pattern. Also, the author chose four sample abstractsrandomly and analyzed them specifically to show how the theoretical framework andresearch methods of this thesis are applied to practice.The results of research show that the most frequently employed thematicprogression pattern in the samples written by English native speakers is theContinuous progression, then the Parallel progression, the Coordinate progression, theConcentrated progression, the Derived progression and the Alternative progression inorder. Therefore, the most preferred thematic progression pattern in the abstracts ofEnglish academic papers is the Continuous progression.Though there are limitations existing in the research, the theoretical and practicalsignificance is undeniable. Theoretically, the study of discourse analysis in terms ofthematic progression patterns is enriched. Practically, it may shed some light on theChinese students when they are writing the English abstracts of Chinese academicpapers.