| An abstract,a vital part of the paper,is an important means of presenting the main content of the article in a clear and concise manner.In an increasingly globalized world of research and academy,abstracts of research articles published are mostly written in English.Regardless of the disciplines or languages,publishers,search agencies and readers rely on them to make initial contact with scholars.In recent years,many linguists have studied abstracts comparing genre and language,but the comparative analysis of abstracts between different disciplines is relatively rare,especially between medicine and economics.In this thesis,respectively 60 English abstracts in medical papers were selected from three medical journals and the three economics journals in terms of impact factor in the year2022.Totally 120 abstracts serve as the corpus in the thesis.The UAM Corpus Tool 3 was used to analyze the themes of the 120 abstracts in these two disciplines based on the thematic theory in systemic functional linguistics.Then the thematic progression patterns used in each abstract were analyzed.Finally,the data in the two databases were compared with the identification of similarities and differences.With both quantitative and qualitative analysis,this thesis aims to address the following questions:(1)What are the overall distributions of themes and thematic progression patterns in the abstracts of medical and economic papers?(2)What are the similarities and differences of the distributions between the abstracts in these two disciplines?The results of the thesis show that in both two types of abstracts,simple linear progression pattern,the same theme pattern,the derived theme pattern,and the split rheme pattern are involved,but there are significant differences in the frequency.In terms of the distribution of theme types,abstracts of both medical and economic papers use a large number of simple themes and unmarked themes.As for the use of thematic progression patterns,the abstracts of economics papers are mainly of the simple linear progression and the same theme progression,and the other two progression patterns are less frequently used.The abstracts of medical papers are mainly using the simple linear progression and the same theme progression,too.But the simple linear progression pattern of medicine papers is used less frequently than that of economics papers.The differences in thinking patterns,research methods,and abstract content requirements of different disciplines lead to these differences in economic and medical papers.Compared with abstracts of medical papers,abstracts of economic papers,being based on realistic problems,are short.Abstracts of medical papers are long in length,full of specialized vocabulary,especially the names of uncommon diseases or treatments.Abstracts of economic papers are mostly written in simple sentences,rarely in long or complexly structured sentences,and most of these have a common declarative structure.In abstracts of medical papers,however,a high proportion of sentences with participial structures,infinitives and prepositional phrases are characterized by brevity and directness to the point.At the same time,the subordinate clauses are simplified into various phrases,such as participial phrases,prepositions and verb phrases.This thesis compares and analyzes the differences in the use of theme and thematic progression pattern in abstracts in economic and medical papers.It assists authors in these two disciplines to grasp the characteristics of the abstract constructions,improving the publication possibility.It also helps paper editors and readers to access the key information in abstracts more easily and improve the efficiency of manuscript reviewing and reading.However,the number of abstracts selected in this thesis is limited,and there is a likelihood of error in the process of marking the theme and the thematic progression patterns. |
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