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A Contrastive Study On Thematic Progression Patterns In English Abstracts Of English Academic Journal

Posted on:2013-04-28Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:X L WangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2235330371980544Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
This study collects fifty papers from six authoritative academic journals oflinguistics, namely, Cognition, Journal of Pragmatics, Linguistics and Education,Foreign Language Teaching and Research, Journal of Foreign Languages, ForeignLanguage Research, of which twenty-five samples are written by English nativespeakers and the rest twenty-five ones are written by the Chinese. The researchtheoretical frameworks of this paper are Zhu Yongsheng’s four thematic progressionpatterns and Xu Shenghuan’s seven logical semantic relations, and these twoframeworks are combined in the whole analytical process.Taking the English abstractsof the fifty papers as objective of the study, this paper makes a contrastive analysis ofthe thematic progression patterns of the academic English abstracts in order to answerthe following three questions:First, what are the characteristics of the two groups in choosing the thematicprogression patterns and what is the preferred pattern in each group?Second, what are the similarities and differences between the two groups afterthe contrastive analysis?Third, what are the factors that caused the similarities and differences?Through the qualitative and quantitative analysis, the results show that thechoices of thematic progression patterns in each group are a little different, but thetotal tendency is the same. In the first group, in which the papers are written by theEnglish native speakers, the most frequent used thematic progression pattern is thelinear progression pattern. In the second group, in which the papers are written byChinese, the most frequent used thematic progression pattern is theme progressionpattern. Then, the paper further discusses why the similarities and differences exist inthe aspect of choosing the thematic progression patterns for each group.Although this study has some limitations in some way, it doesn’t have someinnovations in the theories of thematic progression. It tests and verifies the theories ofthe predecessors to some degree, and enriches the study of thematic progression in textual function in the aspect of theory. For the practical application, the results of thisstudy have the instructive significance in writing the English abstracts of academicpapers, also it has the application value for the college writing teaching, at the sametime it provides the reliable data for the latecomers who want to research the textualthematic progression to compare and discuss.
Keywords/Search Tags:English academic abstract, theme, rheme, thematic progression
PDF Full Text Request
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