A Contrastive Analysis Of Engagement In English Literature Reviews Of Native English-Speaking And Chinese Writers

As an important genre in academic discourse, literature review has been investigated from perspectives of semantic structures and teaching approaches. However, few studies are concerned with its interpersonal meanings. This can be due to the fact that literature reviews have been characterized as neutral and objective. However, evidence shows that literature review writers indeed adopt rhetorical strategies to evaluate previous studies, present arguments and align with readers. This thesis is attempted to explore interpersonal meanings of literature reviews by making a contrastive analysis of different rhetorical choices in literature review texts.Appraisal Theory is introduced by Martin and White to describe the evaluation and interpersonal functions of language. Engagement, a sub-system of Appraisal Theory, is used to investigate interpersonal meanings of discourse from the dialogistic perspective. Based on Engagement, the current study is concerned with a close analysis of interpersonal meanings in literature reviews. Twenty-one literature review texts are selected as corpora for the present study, sixteen of which are selected from linguistics journals in ELSEVIRE, with a total of23,071words, and five are obtained from English M. A. theses in CNKI, with a total of23,136words. Facilitated by Systemic Coder, both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed to contrast distributions and realizations of Engagement resources in two samples.The statistical analysis shows that heterogloss is widely used in literature reviews, with92.2%(782instances) and82.2%(654instances) in two samples respectively. Besides, Chinese writers tend to adopt more bare assertions to set out arguments directly, whereas native English-speaking writers tend to present bare assertions together with detailed explanations. In addition, both English and Chinese writers adopt more expansive resources than contractive ones. Statistics reveal that attribution dominates the frequency in expansive resources, accounting for40.6%and37.6%in each corpus. Despite being similar in frequency of attribution, native English-speaking writers are proficient in using a wider range of reporting devices to engage with readers. As for dialogic contraction, the proportion of resources of disclaim outnumbers those of proclaim by13.4%and13.5%in each sample. More specifically, in resources of disclaim, native English-speaking writers are inclined to choose counter to present the credibility of arguments, while Chinese writers tend to use more instances of denial. In resources of proclaim, both English and Chinese writers prefer to select endorsements. Finally, the thesis sums up typical syntactic patterns of main Engagement resources (attribute and counter) in target texts.By analyzing differences and similarities of distributions and realizations of Engagement in two samples, this thesis aims to investigate how English and Chinese writers build interpersonal relations in academic discourse. It also offers pedagogical implications to help students construct appropriate writer-reader relations in literature review writing.