A Cross-disciplinary Genre Study Of Ph.D.Dissertation Abstracts

Among a number of academic genres,the abstract is considered as one important genre in publishing and retrieving research articles.It presents the contents of an article and enables readers to survey the main idea of this article quickly.Thus,the analysis of abstracts has attracted researchers' attention,and they have done a lot research to analyze the rhetorical moves and linguistic features of abstracts(eg.Swales,1990;Bhatia,1990;Santos,1996;Hyland,2000;Ju,2004;Ye & Liu,2013).This thesis seeks to find differences and similarities between Ph.D.dissertation abstracts of engineering and applied linguistics and discusses the reasons that may lead to these differences from aspects of rhetorical moves and linguistic features.This thesis adopted a seven-move model(including introduction,purpose,method,structure,product,conclusion,evaluation)which is based on Hyland's(2000)five-move model of abstract analysis,and analyzed two abstract corpora.These corpora consisted of 60 Ph.D.dissertation abstracts selected from ProQuest,which constructed an applied linguistics abstracts corpus(AAC)and an engineering abstracts corpus(EAC).These dissertation abstracts were written by candidates of top20 U.S universities ranked by USNEWS.In order to ensure the reliability and validity of this research,AntConc 3.2.2 and SPSS were used to analyze the rhetorical moves and linguistic features.This thesis is designed to answer the following questions:1)What are the rhetorical moves of English Ph.D.abstracts of engineering and applied linguistics?2)What are the differences between the rhetorical moves of English Ph.D.abstracts of engineering and applied linguistics?3)What are the linguistic features of English Ph.D.abstracts of engineering and applied linguistics?4)What are the differences between the linguistic features of English Ph.D.abstracts of engineering and applied linguistics?The following conclusions are summarized and presented in this thesis.Firstly,the abstracts of applied linguistics are longer than the abstracts of engineering.Secondly,the most frequent rhetorical structures of applied linguistics and engineering are I-P-M-S-Pr-C and I-P-M-Pr-C.Thirdly,in terms of linguistic features,both corpora prefer first person pronoun.However,the frequency of “I” in AAC is higher than that in EAC,and the frequency of “we” in EAC is higher than that in AAC.For voice,except for the M move,other moves all prefer to use active voice.For tense,when authors introduce the background and results,AAC prefers the simple past tense,and the EAC prefers the simple present tense and the present perfect tense.For modal verb and shell noun,the frequency of modal verb is influenced by the rhetorical move instead of the difference of disciplines,and both corpora prefer the factual shell nouns.Based on the findings in this study,suggestions are provided to improve the academic abstract writing for Chinese university students,especially the doctoral candidates.In addition,this study might also enrich the study of abstracts of soft-applied and hard-applied disciplines written by doctoral candidates which haven't been paid enough attention before.