A Contrastive Study Of Syntactic Complexity In English Abstracts Of Research Articles Written By Native And Chinese Writers

The intensified academic interaction throughout the world has made the English abstracts of research articles(RA abstracts) the limelight in the academic circle. Unlike the previous studies on RA abstracts which are conducted from the perspective of lexicon and genre analysis, the present study explores the RA abstracts at the sentential level with an aim to reveal whether there is any intercultural and interdiscipline difference in the syntactic complexity of RA abstracts as well as in the choice of certain sentence types.The present study is mainly based on the theory of interlanguage and contrastive rhetoric. The corpus-based approach is adopted and six sub corpora are established. The corpora consist of totally 270 abstracts collected from 18 influential journals( IF>1) from home and abroad in the field of linguistics, medicine and computer science. The explored12 sentence types are later tagged by hand for data retrieval and counting of frequency.After abundant data process, the following conclusions are achieved with the help of L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer, Ant Conc 3.2.1 and SPSS 17.0:(1) There is a significant difference between the length of RA abstract in NWC and CWC. Among the three disciplines, the abstract in medicine enjoys the longest length and shows no significant intercultural difference.(2) While the number of sentence written by native writers and Chinese writers has no significant difference with each other according to the present study, the sentences written by native writers is much longer and complex than that written by Chinese writers. Native English writers are used to applying more complex sentence structures and subordination than Chinese writers in all three disciplines.(3)Statistically significant difference in terms of the number of sentences, clauses and T-units can be found only in the field of linguistics, but not in the other two disciplines. In addition,the scholars in medicine tend to write more sentences, clauses and T-units.With respect to the choice of sentence types, the result shows that there exist both similarities and differences between native English writers and Chinese writers among the three disciplines. Besides, in the twelve sentence types examed in this research, passive sentences, coordinating relation sentence and adjectival clauses are the most frequently used sentence types, which are preferred by both the native English writers and Chinese writers in all three disciplines. The least frequently used sentence types are extraposition,appositive clause, existential sentences and causal relation sentences.This study has expended the research domain of studies concerning RA abstract. The self-established corpora and massive data achieved in this study can provide robust data for future studies. The study is also expected to shed light on the instruction of abstract writing for Chinese scholars.