An Intertextual Analysis Of Criticality In English Research Article Introductions

With the rapid development of globalization and international academic communication, an increasing number of scholars have published research articles (RAs) in academic English to report their research work. Studies on academic discourse have been drawing much attention.It is essential to evaluate research achievements of other scholars, that is to express criticality in the process of writing academic articles. Linguists have done much research on criticality.However, there are few studies conducted on criticality from the perspective of intertextuality.This thesis conducted an investigation on criticality of English RA introductions from the perspective of intertextuality and adopted the typology of intertextuality proposed by Bhatia to analyze 80 RA introductions in the area of marine science and technology which are chosen from electronic editions. The differences between Chinese scholars and native-speaker scholars in the use of intertextual cues to express criticality are compared and analyzed. The results show that Chinese scholars prefer to use allusions to express criticality while native-speaker scholars prefer to use negation to express criticality among horizontal intertextual cues. The results also indicate that among vertical intertextual cues, Chinese scholars tend to use refer to predicted texts to express criticality and establish intertextual relationship between introduction and main body. However, vertical intertextual cues used by native-speaker scholars are more evenly distributed. This thesis attributes the differences in writing RAs between Chinese scholars and native-speaker scholars to different cultural background and ways of thinking. These findings will be of significance to the instruction of English academic writing.