| An abstract should be viewed as a mini-version of the paper.(Day,1988,p.56).That is to say,abstracts condense the main content of academic theses and plays a very important role in theses.By reading the abstract of a thesis,readers can immediately get the main idea of the thesis,and thus to further judge whether it is useful or not for further reading.The objectiveness and informativeness of abstract decides its vital role in the study of academic thesis.Therefore,the study of abstract has attracted more and more attention from scholars.In recent years,the study of abstract mainly focuses on genre analysis,stylistic analysis,cohesion and coherence and thematic structures.There are few researchers who tried to study abstracts from the perspective of transitivity,therefore,it's necessary to fill this research gap.Choosing the transitivity system of Halliday's Systemic-functional Grammar as the theoretic framework,this thesis will make a comparative study of Chinese and English abstracts to find out the similarities and differences of transitivity processes.This thesis mainly adopts the comparative study method and corpus linguistic study method.The abstracts chosen should meet the requirement that they all contain four moves(Introduction,Method,Result and Discussion).Under this condition,the author chooses 60 English abstracts written by Chinese and English linguistic majors from PQDT and CNKI.30 abstracts selected from PQDT are written by English postgraduates whose mother tongue is English,and the other 30 selected from CNKI are written by Chinese postgraduates whose mother tongue is Chinese.All the theses were published from 2015 to 2017.With the aid of UAM Corpus Tool,this thesis analyzes the transitivity features of abstracts written by Chinese and English linguistic majors from the general distribution features and the distribution features in the four moves of English abstracts.This study finds that: there are similarities and differences in the use of transitivity processes between Chinese and English postgraduates' theses.The similarities are: first,five process types: material process,relational process,mental process,verbal process and existential process all appeared in Chinese and English postgraduates' abstracts,among which material process occupies the highest percentage,and relational process the second,followed by mental process,existential process and verbal process.Second,material process and relational process are the dominant process types in three moves of English abstracts,material process is the only one dominant process type in the Method Move.The differences are: Firstly,Material process and mental process are found to be significantly different in frequencies between Chinese and English postgraduates' abstracts.Secondly,the behavioral process appeared only in the English postgraduates' abstracts.Thirdly,the proportion of material process is larger in the Chinese postgraduates' abstracts than in English postgraduates' abstracts,while the proportion of relational process,mental process,verbal process,existential and behavioral processes is larger in the English postgraduates' abstracts.Fourthly,the distribution of each process type in the four moves are different.The findings demonstrates the similarities and differences of transitivity process types in MA theses written by Chinese and English postgraduates,which enable learners to better grasp the features of English abstracts to improve their further writing of English abstracts.This thesis makes a comparative study of Chinese and English postgraduates' abstracts,which on the one hand broadens the applying scope of transitivity theory and enriches researches in this field,on the other hand,through comparison,some useful implications can be summarized which will help learners further understand the features of abstract discourse,thus to guide the teaching and writing of students' academic theses. |
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