A Study Of Informative English Abstracts Of Economic Research Papers

With the rapid development of modern economy, the great contribution of economic studies to economy becomes more obvious. As a shortcut to quickly search through the literature of economic studies, English abstracts of economic research papers should be the research object so as to be of some help to its writing, which is necessary and significant to both the readers and authors of the papers.The present study adopts an approach of systemic-functional linguistics, the three meta-functions and the context of situation, to analyze informative English abstracts of economic research papers and generalize the common linguistic features of this genre to offer some help to those who have trouble in or are poor at its writing. The present study consists of two steps, namely, analyzing and explaining. The analyzing is carried out through examining the realization of the three meta-functions of the data, 50 English abstracts of economic research papers, and working out the common linguistic features by comparing the frequency of occurrence of their linguistic features. The explaining is performed through investigating the context of situation, namely, the register, of the data and explaining and proving why the common linguistic features are essential to English abstracts of economic research papers.After the present study, it is found that: (1) material and relational processes are most common processes and the clauses in which the subjects are usually impersonal or thingified account for the great majority; (2) the positive declarative clauses in present tense are the absolute majority of the clauses; (3) multiple themes and marked themes account for the minority and the cohesion is carried out mainly by such cohesive devices as lexical cohesion, reference and conjunction, mainly referring to prepositions and conjunctions. And a remarkable...