A Comparative Study Of Rhetorical Relations In English And Chinese Research Article Abstracts

have a significant role in research articles.An abstract of high quality not only increases readers’ desire in reading the paper but also increases the chances of the paper being accepted in an academic conference or a journal article.Fruitful studies of research article abstracts have been made so far,yet little attention has been paid to the comparison of English and Chinese abstracts from the perspective of Rhetorical Structure Theory.Rhetorical Structure Theory put forward by Mann and Thompson(1987)is a theory of description of discourse structure.It provides a useful framework for various discourse analyses.The structure of a text is hierarchically connected.Two small parts are linked together by a certain relation to form a large part and then the large part is linked with another large part to form a larger part by a certain relation.It continues with a set of recurrent relations till the whole text is composed.Based on this theory,the current study is conducted quantitively and qualitatively to explore the similarities and differences of rhetorical relations in English and Chinese research article abstracts and to address the following questions.(1)What kinds of rhetorical relations are frequently used in Chinese and English research article abstracts?(2)What are the similarities and differences of rhetorical relations in Chinese and English research article abstracts?(3)What are the possible reasons for the similarities and differences of Chinese and English research article abstracts?The data analyzed in the current study is 50 Chinese research article abstracts and50 English research article abstracts from domestic and foreign authoritative academic journals.Based on RSTTool,rhetorical relations are annotated and identified.After the data is processed by the RSTTool,types and frequencies of rhetorical relations are revealed.To further investigate the similarities and differences in distributions of rhetorical relations in Chinese and English abstracts,the chi-test square of independence is performed accordingly.The final result shows that 19 types of rhetorical relations appear in both Chinese and English abstracts.They are relations of background,circumstance,concession,condition,contrast,elaboration,evaluation,evidence,joint,list,means,non-volitional cause,non-volitional result,preparation,purpose,sequence,solutionhood,summary,and restatement.491 rhetorical relations in total are applied in English research article abstracts while 392 rhetorical relations in Chinese research article abstracts,with an average of 9.82 in each English research article abstract and 7.84 in each Chinese research article abstract.Similarities exist in the five most frequently occurring rhetorical relations and the two least frequently occurring rhetorical relations.Relations of background,elaboration,joint,non-volitional result and preparation are the five relations that most frequently occur while solutionhood relation and restatement relation have the lowest frequency.The result of the chi-test square of independence suggests that there is no significant correlation in frequencies of the multinuclear relations and presentational relations i.e.,no significant difference exists in the overall distributions of the multinuclear relations and presentational relations in English and Chinese research article abstracts.However,there is a significant correlation between frequencies of subject-matter relations in English and Chinese research article abstracts i.e.,significant differences exist in the overall distribution of subject-matter relations.More specifically speaking,evaluation relation and non-volitional result relation are preferred in a Chinese abstract while circumstance relation,elaboration relation,means relation,nonvolitional cause relation,and purpose relation are preferred in an English abstract.Similarities of rhetorical relations in Chinese and English research article abstracts can be attributed to the genre.As a specific genre,abstracts emphasize conciseness and informativeness.Rhetorical relations that most frequently occur and least frequently occur in Chinese and English research article abstracts represent the characteristics of abstracts.The reasons for the differences are mainly explained from the perspective of the reader’s responsibility and the author’s responsibility.English is the language of the author’s responsibility,and the author himself assumes responsibility to provide the reader with as much information as possible;Chinese is the language of the reader’s responsibility,and the reader is deemed to have sufficient background information.The result of the study will make some pedagogical implications for writing research article abstracts and also make a theoretical contribution to the study of abstract and Rhetorical Structure Theory.