A Contrastive Study Of Metadiscourse In Interactions Between Introductions And Conclusions Of English And Chinese Research Articles

Research articles is an important medium for collecting academic research results.The RA Introductions present the general framework of the article and launches the theme of the article;while the RA Conclusions summarize the whole content of the article,which is the deepening of the theme.Introductions and Conclusions,two important parts of research articles,have attracted much attention from scholars.However,few studies have compared the interaction characteristics between English and Chinese research articles.This study examines how authors with different languages and cultural backgrounds build discourse through the interaction between Introductions and Conclusions from the perspectives of macroscopic move structures and microscopic metadiscourse.This thesis combines Swales' CARS model(1990)and Hyland's model of metadiscourse(2005),analyzing 60 RA Introductions and Conclusions(30 Chinese and 30 English)extracted from two leading journals in the field of linguistics,Applied Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching and Research,which were published in the period of 2014-2016,and conducts a corpus-based genre analysis on a sample of these.This study makes a contrast of interactive features between Introductions and Conclusions of Chinese and English research articles from the perspective of metadiscourse and summarizes similarities and differences of the papers of native speakers of Chinese(NSC)and native speakers of English(NSE),in order to summarize the common and specific implementation of the introduction and conclusion in the interactive use of metadiscourse between the English native English speakers and Chinese native speakers.The result of the present study shows that the authors of English native language and Chinese native language allow the interaction between Introductions and Conclusions in the field of linguistics periodicals.The main mode of interaction is announcing the present research-statements of results.Relative to the Chinese research articles,the interactive model between the introductions and conclusions of the English research articles appears to be more obvious.In interactions between Introductions and Conclusions of English and Chinese research articles,the employment of metadiscourse presents many similarities,which show higher use frequency of interactive metadiscourse than interactional metadiscourse.Among the interactive categories,transition markers and frame markers are used the most frequently,while endophoric markers are rarely used.Among the interactive categories,hedges and boosters ranks the highest frequency.The differences between metadiscourse use are showed as follows: Chinese research articles seldom use code glosses and hedges in the Introductions,while greater use of boosters in Conclusions and English research articles tend to use hedges in the Conclusions.This study can not only help us understand the writing features of the introduction and conclusion discourse of international journal articles,but also provide a good reference model for Chinese authors to write introductions and concluding remarks in English journal articles.