A Contrastive Study On Interactive Meta-Discourse In Article Abstracts By American And Chinese Scholars In Mechanical Engineering Journals

Meta-discourse, as a typical device of contrastive rhetoric, is a crucial tool for organizing texts, guiding readers and indicating the attitudes and stance of writers, which has drawn attentions from many scholars to carry out various researches from a wide range of aspects. However, few researches are on the application of one certain kind of meta-discourse in the writing practice of a certain field.Based on the meta-discourse model proposed by Hyland in 2005 and the Contrastive Inter-language Analysis(CIA), the present study adopts a quantitative and a qualitative study to probe the similarities and discrepancies of interactive meta-discourse in article abstracts by American-based and Chinese mechanical engineering scholars, followed by the exploration of the possible causes. The purpose of the present study is to provide some useful guidance and enlightenment for Chinese mechanical engineering scholars to shrink the gaps between the inter-language and target language in the use of English interactive meta-discourse in writing abstracts of mechanical engineering articles.Two corpora are built in the present study at first, each consisting of 100 abstracts randomly selected from American Society of Mechanical Engineering(ASME) and several famous Chinese journals of mechanical engineering. Next, UAM Corpus Tool2.0 is adopted to encode the texts and SPSS16.0 is used to process the data for analysis. The results indicate the following similarities in the two corpora:(1) the common use of interactive meta-discourse;(2) the more common use of transitions, frame markers and code glosses than evidential and endophoric markers. What’s more, significant differences are also found:(1) American-based scholars adopt much more transitions, code glosses, endophoric markers and evidential markers than Chinese scholars, while frame markers are much more used by Chinese scholars;(2) American-based scholars are more flexible in using interactive meta-discourses to perform different functions and in using various words or phrases to perform the same function;(3) American-based scholars are more inclined to adopt the explicit markers such as code glosses, transitions and evidential markers.Finally, on the basis of Inter-language Theory, the gaps of the application of meta-discourse markers have been found and analyzed between the Chinese scholars and the American scholars in the writing of abstracts in the field. Then based on Language Transfer Theory, possible causes of this gap have been concluded from the aspects of cultural transfer, training transfer and other factors, aiming at helping Chinese scholars, especially mechanical engineering scholars, to construct proper abstracts for publishing papers in international journals and providing some useful information and enlightenment for teaching English academic writing in college and the acquisition of meta-discourse markers of English.