A Contrastive Study On Graduation Resources In English Abstracts Written By Chinese And American MA Students

The appraisal theory studies how people employ language to express their attitudes or emotions,which is composed of three subsystems: attitude,engagement and graduation.The subsystem of graduation has a special status within the appraisal system,as attitude and engagement are the domains of graduation which differ according to the nature of the meanings being scaled.On the basis of the graduation system under the appraisal theory,this thesis aimed to make a contrast of the usage of graduation resources between Chinese and American MA abstracts.Two major questions were targeted in the present study: 1.Is there any significant difference in the frequency of graduation resources between the English abstracts written by Chinese MA students and American MA students? 2.Is there any difference in the distributional mode of graduation resources between the English abstracts written by Chinese MA students and American MA students?In this thesis,30 Chinese MA abstracts and 30 American MA abstracts,each with a length of 200-300 words were compared in terms of the frequency and distributional modes of graduation resources.The frequency of graduation resources in Chinese and American MA abstracts were compared through independent-samples t-test.The distributional mode were contrasted through the comparison in distributional composition and distributional evenness.Distributional composition refers to the ranking trend of the proportions of the graduation resources.Distributional evenness compares the balances between the proportions of the graduation resources.The results show that Chinese students employed significantly larger amounts of extent quantification than American students,while American students employed process intensification and actualization much more frequently than Chinese students.As for the distributional mode,it was found that Chinese and American MA abstracts were generally different.The distribution modes of force,intensification,quantification and attribute intensification were different in both distributional composition and evenness,and the distribution modes of graduation,focus,process intensification,amount quantification,authenticity,completion and actualization were the same in distributional composition butdifferent in distributional evenness.The thesis may help students clearly grasp the differences in the employment of graduation,and thus help them adopt graduation more appropriately to express their academic communicative purposes.