A Comparative Study Of The Grammatical Metaphor In English Abstracts Of Doctoral Dissertations In Linguistics Written By Chinese And American Students

An abstract is an abbreviated,accurate representation of the contents of a thesis without any interpretation or discussion.It is an important genre which has the features of formality,specificity,and integrity.Due to the fact that abstract is an indispensable part in academic article,and its quality determines how many times the article is retrieved and cited,many scholars have conducted research about abstracts.At present,the studies about abstracts have been conducted from three aspects:instructions of the standardized writing;the genre analysis of abstracts;cross-cultural or cross-linguistic concerns.However,contrastive studies on the lexical and grammatical features of English Abstracts of Linguistic Dissertations written by Chinese and American students from the point of grammatical metaphor are rare.Grammatical metaphor has become a heated research focus since 1985 when Halliday first proposed the notion "Grammatical metaphor"(GM)in his book An Introduction of Functional Grammar.It has been acknowledged that nominalization in grammatical metaphor is commonly used in academic discourse,so many scholars have conducted investigations into nominalization and its function in academic discourse.However,verbalization as well as other aspects of grammatical metaphor has been neglected.Moreover,there is also a lack of corpus-based comparative study of the use of grammatical metaphor in the empirical research,especially the comparative study of English as Foreign Language(EFL)learners' doctoral dissertation discourse and the native speakers' corresponding discourse.Therefore,based on the grammatical metaphor theory,this thesis conducts a statistical and contrastive analysis of GM in the selected one hundred pieces of doctoral dissertation abstracts constructed by Chinese learners and native English speakers with quantitative and qualitative methods.The research mainly focuses on the distribution characteristics,the similarities and differences,and also the functions of GM in the English abstracts of Chinese advanced English learners'and native English students' doctoral dissertations.With the help of two self-built corpora,major findings of this study are as follows:Firstly,grammatical metaphors exist universally in doctoral dissertation abstracts written by Chinese learners and native English speakers.Secondly,nominalization is the main realization form of GM in both Chinese learners' and native English speakers' dissertation abstracts.Thirdly,the functions of grammatical metaphor in abstracts can be summarized as:1)Grammatical metaphor can condense the length of abstracts and simplified the structure of s;2)Grammatical metaphor can increase the objectivity of abstracts;3)Grammatical metaphor can enhance the coherence of abstracts discourse.Finally,there are more GMs in per clause in native English speakers' doctoral dissertation abstracts than in Chinese English learners' doctoral dissertation abstracts,and native speakers tend to use more types of GMs in their doctoral dissertation compared with Chinese students.