A Corpus-based Study Of The Unconventional Moves In The English Abstracts Of M.A. Theses

As a literary genre, research paper abstract is an abbreviated, accurate and comprehensive generalization and summarization of the whole academic research. It is the window for readers to quickly grasp the research information, as a concentration of the main content reported in the academic research. The quality of an abstract would directly affect whether the research paper could be published, retrieved, read and cited. How to write a sound English abstract is an important and urgent problem for the non-native English authors.In recent years, studies on genre analysis of English abstract has been on constant rise. However, most of them focus on the general macro-structure and micro linguistic features of the abstract in a certain field or various disciplines, and making comparative analysis between the abstracts from different disciplines or between the Chinese and foreign abstracts. In brief, most of them, within the framework of genre analysis theory, conduct research on the theoretical and conventional features in the abstract, but few of them pay attention to the genre-specific characteristics, which deviate from the theoretical and conventional structure involved in the abstract.In accordance with the genre analysis theory and move-step method of the Swalesian School, a quantitative and qualitative analysis on the macro structure and micro linguistic features of the unconventional moves in the M.A thesis English abstracts is conducted in the present research. In addition, the five-move structure model of the abstract summarized by Ge Dongmei and Yang Ruiying, namely, Research Background — Research Topic — Research Method — Research Result — Research Conclusion, was taken as the analyzing criteria in it. By means of random stratified sampling method, a corpus of 90 English abstracts of M.A theses, which were finished from 2012 to 2014 and extracted from the disciplines of Literal Arts, Science and Engineering and Medicine from CNKI, was built in this master thesis. On the basis of such a corpus, the research data was collected and studied.The research result showed that writers of the M.A. thesis abstract basically follow the theoretical and conventional structure model. However, in order to achieve some special communicative purposes, such as, to clarify the complexity of abstracts, to attract the reader’s special attention and to achieve the conciseness of abstracts, they would also use some unconventional moves. In terms of the macro structure, such unconventional moves mainly occur in the following five models: Combined Move, Repeated Move, Reversed Move, Circular Move, and Omitted Move. As for the linguistic features, under the influence of the communicative purpose of each move, the unconventional move presents similar regularity as the conventional one. In details, both of them usually adopt three predominate tenses: the simple present, the simple past and the present perfect; the active voice is used more frequently than the passive voice; the first personal plural pronoun “we” has a higher frequency than the others in the English abstracts of M.A. theses.This research is a complement of the previous studies on abstract genre analysis, and suggests that in order to better achieve the communicative purpose of the abstract, sometimes it is feasible and necessary to break through the theoretical and conventional abstract writing model, and make use of some proper unconventional move models in the writing process of M.A. thesis English abstract. The research findings of the macro structure and micro linguistic features of the unconventional move in the present research may have some reference significance for second language writing, especially for academic abstract writing.