The Study Of Generic Module Structures Annotation On Academic Discourses

Nowadays, with the development of globalization, international academiccommunication has become a platform for the exchange of ideas between scholars.Meanwhile, publishing high-quality research papers is an important criterion to measureindividual research ability or an institution’s academic level. Therefore, many scholarsfrom China and abroad have been implementing studies on every aspect of academicwriting. Among these studies, academic discourse as an important research field hasbeen paid more and more attention. While in this area, most studies are mainly focusedon stylistic features, syntactic analyses, or contrastive study of genres and so on.However, the study of generic module structure annotation on discourses from theperspective of corpus annotation is rarely involved.This study, based on the staged achievements of Chongqing Social ScienceResearch Project and the established Academic Generic Corpus, has explored amodule-structure annotating system of RA introductions according to actual annotatingpractice from the perspective of corpus annotation. The author firstly integrated thetheoretical framework based on theories of Genre Analysis, Transitivity System andFormulaic Sequence from macro level to micro level. Then, based on the theoreticalframework, the author made annotation on200RA introductions in medical science. Atthe end, the annotating data were analyzed and discussed. The results prove thefeasibility and operability of the annotating system in theory and practice as shown inthe following aspects:1. The integrated theoretical framework is qualified to guide the annotation since thethree theories have the mutual relationship in studying discourses. Genre Analysisfocuses on macro generic structures of RA introductions, which shows thecommon patterns of discourse construction. In micro level, Transitivity System ismainly concerned with the lexical features of clauses in each move that tells whichcommon words used in this kind of discourses, and then Formulaic Sequencetheory analyzes discourses from the point of language chunks, which guides theannotation of key sentential patterns.2. The annotated generic module structures bear the generality in academic writingframework. Through the annotation of200RA introductions in medical science, we have found all the annotated generic module structures can be commonly usedin other disciplines, for they are universal rather than specific to one discipline.Therefore, these structures can be used as templates in English academic writing.3. Based on the integrated theoretical framework and annotating practice, anannotating software has been designed. It is the outcome from theory to practice.This software is specialized to annotate the generic module structures of medicalRA introductions, including the structural models, lexical features and sententialpatterns. It is much easier and more convenient to annotate large quantities ofcorpora by utilizing this software and it saves lots of costs and manpower for theannotation.This study has contributed to the linguistic development from the theoretical partto the practical part. It is hoped that this research will help Chinese scholars improvetheir English academic writing ability and promote the international academiccommunication.