A Contrastive Move Analysis Of English Introductions

Genre analysis, as a discourse analysis theory, has attracted a wide spread attention. The past years have witnessed the great interest in genre analysis of academic writings, but previous studies have concentrated on genre study of various parts of academic papers. While the thesis introduction in linguistics is crucial and troublesome to accomplish, the scholars ignored the research of this aspect for so long. This paper takes 100 introductions as the research objectives to find out the move features with the hope of benefiting postgraduates’ writing.By adopting a corpus-based contrastive analysis, the data for present study consists of 100(50 from CNKI and 50 from ProQuest) introductions of linguistic theses. All the theses were randomly collected. A quantitative analysis was carried out to investigate the macro-structure of the thesis introductions with reference to Bunton’s genre analyses. The results show some similarities:(1) The new step, commenting previous research in Move 1, was identified in the two corpora. Both groups tend to adopt more Move l and Move 3 than Move 2;(2) Although Move 1- Move 2- Move 3, always presenting with other moves or move cycles, is the dominant move pattern in both corpora, another variety, Move 2-Move 3 was also found. There are also some differences:(1) The average number of move occurrences in the American corpus is larger than that of the Chinese corpus;(2) Compared with the Chinese writers, the American writers prefer certain steps, such as commenting previous research step, research hypothesis step and research question step;(3) In a few cases, the American writers not only explain the study significance but also admit their inadequacy to the readers in advance, while this phenomenon has not been found in the Chinese corpus. The findings of the research are expected to contribute to the contractive analysis on academic discourse and, at the same time, be helpful to MA candidates in the field of linguistics.