A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of English Abstracts In Journal Articles Of Oil And Gas Energy By Chinese And English Natives

With the development of the new energy sources,the world energy pattern has changed constantly.As a consequence,it is urgent for Chinese scholars in the field of oil and gas to write English abstracts in line with international writing patterns,so as to display their professional achievements in international academia and strive for the right to speak on energy.And the abstract,as an important tool for readers to obtain the basic information of research quickly and concisely,mainly concludes the research content,such as research methods,results and discussions,so it is of great importance to write a standard abstract.The author selected 100 English abstracts written by English natives from several international journals,such as AAPG Bulletin and Oil and Gas Journal,and built Corpus 1.Similarly,100 English abstracts written by Chinese scholars were selected from some domestic journals,such as Petroleum Exploration and Development and Acta Petrolei Sinica.Based on that,Corpus 2 was built.After labeling the move structures and lexical cohesive devices,a comparative analysis of the frequencies of using move structures,cohesive devices,tenses and voices in these corpora has been conducted with Ant Conc 3.5.7software.And the research results were analyzed by SPSS 17.0 software,cohesion theory and genre analysis theory.The results show that:(1)English native speakers tend to adopt Introduction-Method-Result-Discussion model,while Chinese scholars tend to use Method-Result-Discussion model.And there is a significant difference in using the Introduction move between English native scholars and Chinese scholars.(2)As for the use of personal references,English native speakers tend to use more plural forms of first personal references,such as “we/our”,while Chinese scholars prefer to use more third personal references,such as “it/their”;there are significant differences in the use of demonstrative references “here/these” between Chinese and English native scholars;English native speakers use many more kinds of conjunctions than Chinese scholars due to the negative transfer of mother tongue.And there are some significant differences in using some conjunctions,Chinese scholars usually overuse or underuse some conjunctions;in the use of lexical cohesive devices,both English native speakers and Chinese prefer to use repetition and synonymy.(3)In terms of the use of tenses,there is no significant difference between English native speakers and Chinese: The simple present tense is of the highest frequency of using,and the simple past tense is of the second highest frequency,and the simple present perfect tense is of the lowest frequency.(4)Both English native speakers and Chinese scholars tend to use the active voice to express facts and advocate information interaction between the author and the readers rather than blindly pursuing the objectivity of expression.Based on the findings,the author has provided some suggestions that Chinese scholars in the field of oil and gas energy should gradually follow the international academic writing patterns and adopt the Introduction-Method-Result-Discussion model,and strengthen the practice of using cohesive devices,hoping that this study could provide some inspiration for the academic writing and teaching.