| In today's competitive academic world, conforming to academic writing conventions and presenting new ideas are essential for publications. With the internationalization of scientific researches, many Chinese scholars have to engage themselves in this form of English writing, and submit their research articles to some international journals so as to get the results of their studies recognized by academic circles. As one part of research papers, abstracts may directly decide whether their articles can be published, retrieved, or even worth reading; meantime, as a textual pattern, abstracts represent some set of communicative purposes and possess certain schematic structures for the discourse. Therefore, researches on abstract writing have aroused great interest among scholars.But the pressure to publish is continuously increasing and, in order to justify publication, the writers of scientific texts have to indicate a knowledge gap with regard to previously published work and create a research space that allows them to present new knowledge claims to the other members of the discourse community. This implies the use of a number of rhetorical strategies which involve the criticism of members of their own academic community, that is, the enactment of academic criticism. In present English-dominant international academia, the most important issues for scholars, especially non-native researchers, are to conform to the international writing conventions when pointing out the research gap. Linguists have done some researches on the necessity and rhetorical variations of academic criticism in different language cultures. However, so far not much deeper analyses on the discoursal level have been carried out form the aspect of genre analysis.To carry out the present research, 130 pieces of abstracts in the field of applied linguistics selected randomly have been analyzed. 50 of them are chosen from foreign journals by native English writers, 50 English-version abstracts from Chinese journals, and another 30 from overseas journals by native Chinese from the mainland of China. The analysis of data was carried out on two models, one is Swales'IMRC structure of whole research article and CARS model for the introduction part, aiming to find the similarities and differences of move construction among three groups of samples; and the other, based on previous studies, is a tentative model summarized by the present author, used to analyze different rhetorical strategies to enact this phenomenon of academic criticism.The results of this research show that, on the one hand, Chinese writers tend to be in accordance with international writing conventions on the macrostructure of the abstracts, but at micro level, there are obvious discrepancies on specific move construction and writing philosophy. On the other hand, the total number of occurrence of AC is relatively higher in abstracts written by native English, and more impersonal and indirect critical speech acts are employed in these texts, whereas in the Chinese text, the writers opted more frequently for the use of personal and direct academic criticism. These findings are contrary to previous researches that Chinese prefer to convey criticism in a discursive and cautious way. The rhetorical variation is mainly due to the influence of the social context of publication, that is, the relationship between the writers and the discourse community they are addressing, which is different both in terms of size and pressure. The language barrier of Chinese writers and the defect of academic writing in tertiary education may be the other reasons.Moreover, this study also has some basic pedagogical implications. It can help foreign language learners, especially Chinese researchers, write effective English abstracts to meet the international scientific community's expectations. |
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