Information Transmission Of Negative Sentences In EST

Nowadays EST (English for Science and Technology) has become a very important genre of English. The genre of EST has its own distinctive linguistic characteristics, one of which is that a large number of sentences with the structures of passive voice, ellipsis, breaking-up and inversion (Chen Xin, 1999). Many scholars have probed into a variety of English sentences in the area of message transmission and some suppositions are offered by them. However, few researches concerning negative sentences in EST area have been found.Therefore, the author has summarized message transmission functions of negative sentences in EST texts through a careful analysis of the sampling negative sentences from EST journal papers chosen randomly from a magazine entitled the Scientific America in the year 2005 (only the single-month versions from January to October), and wrote down all the negative sentences appearing within this range. The author applied the seven information transmission functions offered by previous language researchers into negative sentences in EST materials and analyzed the top three most frequently used information transmission functions from a microcosmic angle, that is , from the components of each negative structure, and then did analysis of it one by one in detail, and concluded differently for several points and made three different discoveries.Based on the above, the author has provided more detailed and careful description of two information transmission functions, which are the top two functions appearing most frequently in the negative sentences of EST literature and put forward many new ideas about the effect of the structural components of the negative sentences of EST materials on information transmission. The two functions are: the function to emphasize a topic, and the function to describe a topic in an objective way.