Analysis Of The Academic Thesis Introduction

In recent years, a number of studies have been done on different sections of academic discourse, typically including the abstract, introduction, methodology, results and conclusion sections. However, most of the studies are carried out through genre analysis or semantic interpretation of lexico-grammatical devices. While interpersonal meaning is an important aspect of the function of academic course, few studies has interpreted academic course from the aspect of interpersonal meaning. The the study of comparison between the EFL learners and the NES writers in using resources to realize interpersonal interaction is even rare.The Appraisal Theory is an extension of interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics, which is divided into three interacting domains- attitude, engagement and graduation. Engagement is an important sub-system of Appraisal Theory which views discourse as a means to construe the space of discourse negotiation. In order to maintain harmonious relationship with potential readers, writers predict their responses and then adopt different evaluative strategies in academic discourses.Taking the characteristics of introduction into consideration, this thesis applied engagement system of Martin’s Appraisal Theory (2005) to analyze the distribution features when the authors employed the engagement resources to negotiate with other views and other people. It aims to probe into the lexico-grammatical devices employed in introduction part so as to explore how does the writer from different scholar level achieve the evaluation and persuasiveness in the introduction genre.The thesis conducted a comparative study with a self-build corpus which contains 30 introductions concerning English linguistics and literature theses. These materials were all selected randomly. Among them,10 articles were written by English native speakers and published in the international core journals like English For Specific Purposes, Journal of English for Academic Purposes and US-China Education Review Journal of Pragmatics. In the other 20 articles,10 were written by the postgraduates who get the Master Degree and 10 were written by doctors ofEnglish major. All of them are retrievable on the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and China Knowledge Resource Integrated Database.With the help of AntConc Corpus Analysis Tool, the collected data will be annotated according to the constituent of engagement system. Thus the tendency of employing engagement in the introduction will be revealed.The study was guided by the following questions:1) What are the distribution features of each sub-category of the Engagement system in the introduction part of academic discourse by EFL masters, doctors and the NES experts? 2) What are the lexico-grammatical devices employed by EFL masters, doctors and the NES experts in constructing writer-reader relation?By making a comparison of the data collected from the master, the doctor and the expert, this thesis concluded the following findings. Engagement is widely employed in the introduction of all the three groups, and the total number of engagement used by the NES experts is larger than that of the English learners. In the NES experts’ introductions, the frequency of contraction far exceeds that of expansion. The frequency of disclaim far exceeds that of proclaim, especially in the masters’group. The masters are inclined to take advantage of denying strategies and accordingly they ignore the personal interaction. All the authors of the three groups are inclined to acknowledge the external voices, but not overtly to free themselves from the responsibility.With regard to the lexico-grammatical features, since the EFL learners are inexperienced in applying engagement resources, the variety and frequency of engagement resources employed by the authors in the postgraduate stage are limited, while the doctors and the experts are skillful in this process. The EFL authors have a preference in employing the modal auxiliary such as may, might, could must as well as the adverbial adjunct, while the NES authors are deftly applying those strategies both on the variety and frequency.From the above conclusions, it can be seen that all the authors have preferences in adopting engagement resources to realize the function of introduction better. This study not only expands the scope which appraisal theory researches but also is helpful for writers to understand how to realize the interaction with other voices in the introduction of academic articles, how to read foreign literature better and how to write introductions with high quality to achieve the ultimate objective of publishing articles in international authoritative journals.