A Study On Generic Features In Dissertation Abstracts Of English-majored Postgraduates

Abstracts of dissertations play a vital role in the publication of academic papers.In recent years,experts and scholars at home and abroad have begun to analyze abstracts from the perspective of genre.The focus of the genre perspective is the analysis of genre features.The genre features are formal genre structure features,that is,move,and linguistic features in the sense.However,most of the domestic researches on abstracts only stay on the study of generic structure features.The systematic and holistic research on abstracts from the two aspects of generic structure and linguistic features is rare.At the same time,the genre research on the dissertation abstracts of English-majored postgraduates is even rarer.As a group with strong academics,the postgraduates in English majors have problems in their dissertation abstracts writing such as weak awareness in genre type and loose structure in overall organization.Therefore,in order to enrich the research content and perspective of abstract genre and improve the standardization of academic abstract writing for domestic English majors,the paper will conduct a detailed study on the genre features of dissertation abstracts of English-majored postgraduates from the perspective of genre.There were three main research questions in this study:(1)What is the genre structure features of the English-majored masters’ dissertation abstracts? What is the difference of the three-levels’ abstracts in the genre structure?(2)What is the linguistic features of the English-majored masters’ dissertation abstracts? What is the difference of the three-levels’ abstracts in the linguistic features?(3)How to promote the structural integrity and language standardization of master’s abstract writing from the perspective of genre features? For the research questions,this study used the genre analysis method to analyze the macro,micro structural features and linguistic features of the abstracts.The corpora of this study consisted of 40 abstracts which were selected from the excellent master’s thesis full-text database in CNKI(China National Knowledge Infrastructure).The major of all theses where abstracts are located is foreign linguistics and applied linguistics.According to the criteria standard for foreign language and literature in the fourth round of national assessment in 2107,the abstracts in this studywere divided into three layers: A,B,and C,with 14 abstracts in A,13 abstracts in B and C respectively.Then the study used the IMRC model proposed by Bhatia to analyze the features and differences of the macro move structures,micro step structures and linguistic features such hedges,verb tense and first personal pronounce in overall abstracts and the three levels abstracts with research methods of textual analysis and comparative analysis.Finally the study presented the reasons that may caused those commonalities and differences.The research showed that the genre structure of the masters’ theses of English majors was basically the same as the IMRC model.And most of the abstracts used a3-move or 4-move mode.However,there were not many standard 4-move abstracts in the three levels abstracts.The possible reason was that most of the abstracts ignored the communicative purpose and the role of move 4---conclusion.In addition,every move consisted of several steps.Then level A and level B used step1 and step 2 of move 1more frequently than that of level C.It could be seen that C-level abstracts’ research background consciousness and the critical ability of previous research were low.In the use of each step of move 2,level B was the least in three,level A was the most.It was because the abstracts of the level B were not sufficient for the interpretation of the research corpus and the description method of the research method,at least in the three levels was worse.There was no difference in the move 3 of the three levels of abstracts.However,it was worth noting that most of the three levels of abstracts would ignore the move 4.Its frequency of occurrence was also the lowest among the four moves,only60.00%.It was because that most of them had no conclusion consciousness,and the ability to evaluate and discuss the structure was not enough.The research result was directly used as the end of the abstract.In terms of linguistic features,hedges had the highest frequency of occurrence in move 1.The three levels of abstracts did not differ much in the use of hedges.In the use of verb tenses,the three levels of abstracts were heavily used in simple present tense,with less use of simple past tense and present perfect tense.The first person pronoun plural was used much more frequently than its singular.And the most common use of first person pronouns was level A.This paper studied the genre structure and linguistic features of the abstracts of dissertations,and compared the genre structure and linguistic features of the three levelsof abstracts.It obtained the genre structural and linguistic features of the abstracts of the master’s thesis of English majors and summarized the unique rules and methods of abstract writing.The study also tentatively proposes a writing guidance framework for English dissertation abstracts based on the research results.It is hoped that it will help postgraduates to better understand the genre features of abstracts in order to improve their ability to write abstracts of dissertations,such as the abilities of organizing structure and using strategies in abstract writing.In addition,it gives some inspirations for the teaching of academic writing.The limitation of this study is that it only studies the subject of foreign linguistics and applied linguistics,which leads to the lack of interdisciplinary comparative study of genre.Then the next research direction may be a comparative analysis of linguistics and other disciplines.At the same time,in future research,different analytical methods will be tried to make up for each other to obtain a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of the abstract.