A Comparative Study Of Explanatory Sentences In English Academic Writing Of Chinese And Foreign Graduate Students

In recent years,English academic writing had gradually become the focus of linguistics.However,the existing research in this field mainly focused on the macro-genre level,but the micro-level research on the sentence level was relatively rare.In addition,the existing research on the sentence level was mostly limited to sentence forms,and rarely from the functional point of view.Hence this thesis proposed the term explanatory sentences from a functional point of view,which referred to sentences with the functions of definition,cause-effect,exemplification,comparison-contrast,process,division-classification in academic texts.Based on the self-built corpus of Chinese Postgraduate Academic Written English(CAWE)and the British Academic Written Corpus(BAWE),this thesis aimed to compare and analyze the distribution characteristics of explanatory sentences in Chinese and native students' English academic discourses,and tried to explain from the perspective of contrastive rhetoric why the distribution of the explanatory sentences were different.The main findings of this thesis were as follows.First,from the overall distribution,explanatory sentences were distributed throughout the academic texts in both BAWE and CAWE,but its distribution frequency in CAWE is slightly lower than in BAWE.Second,from the specific distribution of these six explanatory sentences,except for the procedural sentence,the other five sentences distributed in BAWE were markedly different from CAWE,and the standardized frequencies of comparison-contrast sentences and division-classification sentences distributed in CAWE are higher than those in BAWE.Third,from the distribution of the high-frequency structures of these explanatory sentences,the standardized frequencies of each high-frequency structure of these sentences were different in BAWE and CAWE,but they had certain similarities in grammatical organizations.Forth,the reasons for the difference in the distribution of explanatory sentences between BAWE and CAWE may be related to the writers' language ability,cultural background,thinking mode,and interactive awareness.Based on the above findings,this thesis aimed to help Chinese postgraduates publish academic papers and optimize English academic writing teaching.