A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On Moves Of Abstracts In Academic Papers Written By Chinese And English Native Speakers

Academic papers all over the world has flooded in recent years,with English abstracts being required in the ace academic journals,which helps readers easily retrieve and download the corresponding papers globally.Hence,English abstracts of academic papers are of great importance.The purpose of this thesis is to find differences between moves in English abstracts of academic papers written by Chinese authors and English native speakers.In addition,the author aims to find the linguistic features of moves in English abstracts in academic papers.In this thesis,300 English abstracts were selected randomly from Applied Optics and Acta Optica published in 2016 and two corpora were built.The author labelled moves manually and used PowerConc tool to find out the frequencies of the five moves in the 300 abstracts.Then the frequency of different moves as well as the linguistic features of the moves in abstracts of academic papers was analyzed.The results show that most of the abstracts in C1(abstracts from Applied Optics)and C2(abstracts from Acta Optica)follow the principle of the five-move model.However,abstracts with five moves are rare in both corpora,while abstracts with three and four moves are of great numbers in corpora.The move orders of most of the abstracts in the two corpora basically conform to the order of BIMRD.However,there are also complex orders in both corpora such as cycle,reversion and repetition.As for linguistic features,the frequency of modal verbs in C1 is higher than that of C2,especially in M3 and M4.The frequency of “frequency adverbs” is higher in C2 than that in C1,and C2 uses “always,usually,hardly,and often” a lot,while C1 uses “usually,often”.Meanwhile,the author finds that it is only in M1 that Chinese authors use the present perfect tense,while English native speakers sometimes use it in M3,with the purpose of emphasis on the importance of the current research.In these two corpora,active voice is more commonly used than passive voice.The active voice in M3 and M4 is of the highest frequency.Different lexical chunks are used in different moves because of the functions of the moves.This research on the moves of English abstracts in academic papers hopes that it can also contribute to the improvement of Chinese scholars' English abstract writing.