A Contrastive Study On Syntactic Complexity Of Chinese And Foreign Masters' Thesis English Abstract

In order to figure out whether there is difference between Chinese and foreign thesis abstract in syntactic complexity.We sampled 100 Master thesis abstracts in the field of Linguistics from PQDT(ProQuest Dissertations and Theses)and CNKI(China National Knowledge Infrastructure)respectively;and 100 Master thesis abstracts in the field of Biology from PQDT and CNKI respectively.The total 400 abstracts consist of four corpora,namely foreign Linguistics thesis abstract corpus(FLC),Chinese Linguistics thesis abstract corpus(CLC),foreign Biology thesis abstract corpus(FBC)and Chinese Biology thesis abstract corpus(CBC).These four corpora were analyzed with 14 syntactic complexity measures using the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer.The study aims to find differences of syntactic complexity between Chinese and foreign Master thesis abstract.The results show that there are significant differences between Chinese Master thesis abstract and foreign Master thesis abstract.Besides,in present study,syntactic complexity in the field of Biology shows more significant measures than that in the field of Linguistics.In the length of production,there was no significant difference between Chinese and the foreign Master thesis abstracts in the field of Linguistics,while the MLC of Chinese Masters was significantly lower than that of the latter in the field of Biology.In sentence complexity,the C/S of Chinese Masters is significantly higher than that of foreign Masters only in the field of Biology.In the subordination,the DC/C of Chinese Masters is significantly higher than that of foreign Masters.In coordination,CP/C and CP/T of Chinese Masters are obviously lower than that of foreign Masters which reaches a significant level.Both in the subordination and in the particular structures,there was no significant difference between Chinese and the foreign Master thesis abstracts.The present research has enriched the study concerning academic abstract writing.The established corpora and the large amount of data achieved in this study can provide strong data support for abstract writing.This study is also expected to shed light on the instruction of abstract writing of Chinese Masters.