| As a miniversion of a research article, the well-prepared abstract can introduce the main contents of the paper and increase the chances of being accepted by academic community. Although scholars both at home and abroad have done a lot of work on English abstracts, they mainly focus on language features of abstracts in social and scientific fields from the perspective of genre analysis. However, the study on English abstracts of research articles from the perspective of Rhetorical Structure Theory(RST, Mann & Thompson, 1978) is rare and not deep enough. Due to the coherence and hierarchy of RST Tool in discourse analysis, we propose that there must be a standard rhetorical relation diagram for English abstracts of edu-tech(educational technology) articles.In order to verify the above hypothesis, the present study makes a contrastive study on English abstracts of edu-tech articles from the perspective of RST, aims to answer the following three questions:(1) Which rhetorical relations are frequently-used in the two groups?(2) What are the differences and similarities between the two groups in using rhetorical relations? And what are the reasons?(3) What are the dominant rhetorical relations of each hierarchy in the tree diagrams of the two groups?By the means of quantitative and qualitative methods, the study establishes two separate corpus of 35 English abstracts chosen from Chinese and foreign prestigious journals. The statistics show that the average length of English abstracts in the domestic group is 4.1 sentences, and there are 17 English abstracts meet the requirement among the 90 abstracts; while, the average length of English abstracts in the foreign group is 6.4 sentences, and there are 18 English abstracts meet the requirement among the 90 abstracts. The English abstracts in the domestic group are written by Chinese scholars and the English abstracts in the foreign group are written by native English speakers. By applying RST and RST Tool345 in analyzing these English abstracts, the study attempts to establish the standard rhetorical relation diagrams for English abstracts of edu-tech articles.The research results show three main points. Firstly, the rhetorical relations that frequently-appeared in the two groups are Sequence relation, Non-volitional Result relation and Background relation. Secondly, there are three differences between the two groups:(1) The number of types and the total applied times of rhetorical relations between the two groups are different. There are 11 types of rhetorical relation and appear 48 times in the domestic group, while 12 types and 78 times in the foreign group.(2) Compared with the domestic group, the rhetorical structures of the foreign group are more complex.(3) Chinese scholars prefer using Evaluation relation, while native English speakers prefer choosing Elaboration relation. Language features, patterns of thought and habits of expression are the main reasons that cause these differences. Thirdly, in the domestic group, the dominant rhetorical relations of each hierarchy are Background relation, Solutionhood relation, Non-volitional Result relation; in the foreign group, the dominant rhetorical relations of each hierarchy are Background relation, Elaboration relation and Non-volitional Result relation, Elaboration relation and Sequence relation.As to the above mentioned research findings, in the first place theoretically, they will prove and further develop the theory of discourse analysis as well as RST. And also practically, the standard rhetorical relation diagram established in the paper is valuable for writing English abstracts, which will increase the chances of being published. In addition, the standard rhetorical relation diagram has practical significance for discourse annotation. The diagram can examine the correctness, science and effectiveness of annotation, and provide convenience for annotating English abstracts of edu-tech articles. |
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