Comparative And Contrastive Observations Of Structural And Informational Analysis Of Linguistic Research Article Titles In English And Chinese

Title is an essential window for readers to understand the content of articles.It is a bridge between readers and authors and plays an important role.In 1973,Claude Duchet,a French linguist,proposed “titleology”,when “titleology” could be merely applied in the study of literary works(Roy,2008).Afterwards,the field of titleology has gradually expanded to the fields of applied linguistics,information science and psychology(Soler,2007).In recent years,with the increasing attention of linguists to academic discourse,the title of research article has gradually become the one of foci of linguists.As a summary of scientific research achievements,research article title enables researchers to quickly and accurately understand the main contents of the article and narrow down and locate the research scope when searching for relevant documents.Therefore,research article titles play an important role in the publication,reading and compilations of papers.This paper reviews the relevant studies from the aspects of title structure,title information,cross-disciplinary and cross-linguistic both at home and abroad.Through the literature review,it is found that most of the previous studies abroad focus on the structure and information of research article in a certain discipline while very few researchers study on contrastive research.Most of the domestic studies on the titles of research article are contrastive studies written by native English speakers and non-native speakers.There are very few studies on Chinese research article titles,even fewer has been conducted in the comparative analysis of research article titles between English and Chinese.Based on the above research situation,this paper selects 28 Chinese and foreign linguistics journals from Elsevier Science and China Nation Knowledge Internet(CNKI).By using the principle of stratified sampling,700 titles,as the corpus of this study,were selected form English and Chinese linguistic research article in the year of 2012 to 2016 respectively.The corpus was analyzed and contrasted on the basis of the title structural features,information,title length,punctuation marks,and high-frequency words.Through a comparative and contrastive analysis,there exist some similarities and differences in title structure,information,length,punctuation marks and high-frequency words in English and Chinese linguistic research articles.First,in terms of the title structure,English linguists tend to use compound titles,while Chinese linguists employ noun phrase titles more;in compound titles,the most frequently used construction is “Nominal Phrases + Nominal Phrase”,which indicates that the nominal phrase is the main structure of English and Chinese research article titles.This is also because the nominal structure can realize the information distribution and economy of the title of the article by means of a variety of pre-modifiers or post-modifiers;English and Chinese titles are both less likely to use verb phrase titles,prepositional phrase titles and full sentence titles.Second,from the aspect of title information,the most frequently used information construction in English and Chinese linguistic research article compound titles is “General-Specific” structure,which shows that domestic and foreign scholars are using subtitles to concretize the contents of the research topics.Thus,readers are the first to notice the most distinctive part of the study.In un-compound titles,English and Chinese linguistics both tend to use the information elements of “Topic” and “Scope”;compound titles and un-compound titles in both corpora have general characteristics in the distribution of information elements: topics ? specific scope.Third,in terms of title length,English and Chinese title is longer than that of the standard of China's National Standard GB7713-87 Science Paper Written Format(1987)and International Standards Organization Rules(1977),which suggests the academic format of title length show diachronic changes;in the use of punctuation marks,English scholars tend to use colon and hyphen,Chinese scholars employ dash and double quotation marks;and in high-frequency words,English and Chinese titles have converged in high-frequency words.This study is of academic value.By integrating the classification of Chinese phrases,summarizing the classification of Chinese titles,it provides some reference standards for the classification of Chinese titles in other fields.Secondly,this study helps researchers to read and write academic title effectively.Thirdly,different academic community have different academic format.If the scholars comprehend the academic format of titles from different academic community,they will be accepted by academic groups much better and high level academic communication could be realized.This paper consists of six chapters.Chapter one introduces the research background,research purpose,research significance and the structure of this paper.Chapter two reviews title structure,title information and contrastive research of title and points out the limitations of previous studies.Chapter three is the research framework of this paper.The author summarizes the classification of title structure and title information,and puts forward a new theoretical framework.Chapter four relates to the research method of this paper,including research questions,data establishment and data analysis steps;Chapter five is the results and discussions,it mainly includes contrastive analysis between Chinese and English linguistic research article titles.Chapter six summarizes the major findings and limitations of this paper,and points out suggestions for future research.