A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In L1and L2English Master Theses Abstracts

An abstract is the epitome of thesis and a brief statement of thesis contents without anyexegesis and discussions. It is an important genre with characteristics of formality, specificity,independence and integrity. At present, relevant studies have been conducted from threeaspects: First, some writing standards have been put forward in many manuals. Second, someresearches of English abstracts have been carried out from the perspective of cross-linguistics.Third, studies on the structural features of abstracts in particular disciplines are carried outfrom the aspect of genre analysis. However, contrastive studies on the lexical andgrammatical features of L1and L2MA thesis abstracts from the point of grammaticalmetaphor are rare.This thesis, based on the reclassification of Grammatical Metaphors (GM) by Halliday,conducts a statistical and contrastive analysis of GM in the selected sixty L1and L2MAthesis abstracts with the adoption of quantitative and qualitative methods, probing into thesefour research questions:1. Do ideational grammatical metaphors universally exist in L1andL2MA linguistic thesis?2. What is the main realization form of ideational grammaticalmetaphors in MA thesis？3. Are there any similarities and differences of using ideationalgrammatical metaphors in L1and L2MA thesis abstracts?4. How do ideational grammaticalmetaphors function in thesis abstracts?The analysis reveals that: thirteen types of Ideational GMs are nearly embodied in theselected abstracts. The occurrence frequency of nominalization ranks the highest. Therefore,nominalization is the main realization form of ideational GMs. And the occurrence frequencyof adjectivization is relatively high. Nominalization and adjectivization plays the mostimportant part in the constructing of abstracts:1.Metaphor can increase the condensation of the abstracts to make the structure concise.2. Metaphor enables readers to explore theobjectivity of MA thesis abstracts.3. Ideational metaphor, especially nominalization,possesses the function of textual coherence. Through data analysis, it can be nailed down thatthe occurrence frequency of ideational GMs in L1MA thesis is lower than in L2MA thesis, inanother word, compared with the latter, the former’ s lexical density, objectivity and textualcoherence is lower, which needs to be noticed in Chinese students’ writing thesis abstracts.The significance of this study consists in carrying out a statistical analysis of thereclassification of grammatical metaphor by Halliday and enriching theoretical basis ofstudying thesis abstracts. In the meanwhile, through the contrastive analysis of L1and L2MAthesis in terms of grammatical metaphor, it reveals some problems and shortcomings inChinese students’ writing thesis abstracts and provides some writing strategies and givesguidance for writing teaching.