A Corpus Based Contrastive Analysis Of Metadiscourse In Interactions Between Introductions And Conclusions Of English And Chinese Master Theses

After entering into the new era of technology and universal education,not only professionals,but also nonprofessionals tend to read academic papers for reference and learning.Scientific research and paper writing become more and more important.The government and relevant departments have set comprehensive review and appraisal systems to control the quality of theses.At present,most of the researches abroad and at home mainly focus on the undergraduate thesis writing,but few on the master and doctoral theses.Limited by the length of a thesis,more researches concentrate on separate chapters,such as abstract,introduction or conclusion,but few on the full text.Moreover,there are few comparative researches on rhetorical skills between native Chinese and English speakers,especially on the interactive relationships between introductions and conclusions in master theses.With the help of the two self-established corpora,the study explores the similarities and differences of how move structure and metadiscourse techniques are used by native Chinese and English postgraduates as well as their contributing reasons,by combining CARS(Create a Research Space)model by John Swales(1990)and interpersonal classification of metadiscourse by Ken Hyland(2005).One corpus contains the samples of 30 master theses randomly selected from PQDT(ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Full Text Search Platform);the 30 samples of the other corpus are selected from CNKI(Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure).There are three questions to be answered in this study,which are listed as follows:1)What are the overall distributions of move structures in the introductions and the conclusions of Chinese and American postgraduates' theses in the field of applied linguistics? What kind of interactional structures are used by native Chinese and American postgraduates?2)How are the interactional structures between the introductions and the conclusions of the master theses achieved by metadiscourses? Are there any differences?3)What are the reasons leading to the similarities and differences in the application of move models and metadiscourses by native Chinese and American postgraduates?Major findings are listed below: 1)In COC,the move structures in the introductions are more complicated than those in the conclusions.At the same time,there exists overlapping or cycling moves and many moves are omitted.In COE,move structures constructed in the conclusions are more complicated,with few moves unused.The common interactional structure is outlining purposes or announcing present research — statements of results.2)In terms of the overall distributions of metadiscourses,the frequencies of interactive metadiscourses are higher than those of interactional metadiscourses in both COC and COE.As for interactive metadiscourses,both native Chinese and English authors tend to use more transition markers and frame markers,helping readers to realize their writing structures.The difference is that the frequencies of metadiscourses used in COC are higher than those in COE,and the uses of metadiscourses are relatively balanced.In COE,transition markers,frame markers,self-mentions and endophoric markers are more frequently used,while other discourse markers are less frequently used.3)Along with the development of information technology,the exchange of thoughts and knowledge becomes more convenient.In order to communicate smoothly,language techniques of scholars in different regions become assimilated.However,China and America share different history,culture and language environment,and the designs of courses and degrees as well as major requirements of these two countries are also different from each other.These aspects do make differences in language use,communication methods and information production skills.Combining the genre analysis of macro perspective with the metadiscourse model of micro perspective,this research has the academic value in identifying and analyzing different move models and interactional structures between the introductions and the conclusions of the native Chinese and English master theses.Meanwhile,its practice significance can not be ignored.Through analyzing the application of metadiscourses,researchers can be taught to construct discoursestructure properly in academic writing.As for reading,readers can be helped to grasp authors' attitudes and to get a deeper understanding of the materials based on authors' cognitive patterns under cross-cultural background.In situations such as public speakings and seminars,the findings of this research can help addressers to construct context for the purpose of effective communication.