A Cross-cultural Study Of Interactions In Dissertation Abstracts

The abstract, as a well-established genre in academic discourse, has increasingly become a topic of interest in fields of linguistics, rhetoric, and the teaching of academic writing. An adequate abstract serves to introduce the academic discourse and, to some extent, to promote the whole research. As Fairclough(1995) suggests, abstract involves certain ?marketization?-a promotion of oneself and one?s paper through discursive means which might be regarded similar to the promotion of goods.This study presents a contrastive study on interactions in abstracts of doctoral dissertations in the field of applied sciences written in English. 60 abstracts are analyzed in the present study, half of which are written by doctoral students of South China University of Technology(SCUT), and another half, by those of California Institute of Technology(Caltech). By analyzing the use of stance and engagement markers, this study explores similarities and differences between two groups of abstracts in terms of interactions in discourse, followed by a cross-cultural examination to find out the underlying factors contributing to the differences.The findings of this study indicate that there exist obvious differences between abstracts written by the two groups of writers in terms of interacting with readers. Interactional resources in Caltech abstracts are found to be more pervasive than those in SCUT abstracts in number and frequency. It implies that SCUT writers, compared with their Caltech counterparts, are more reluctant to interact with their reader and to “sell” their study. The findings also suggest that traditional values of a culture may influence the academic culture of a nation. That is, different perceptions of ethical canons, of the politeness concept, and of principles for producing and interpreting utterances between English and Chinese may contribute to the manifestations of writers? choice of interactional markers.The present study highlights the role of interactions in abstracts writing. The findings of this study have some pedagogical implications for teaching academic writing for postgraduate students. In writing a disciplinary acceptable abstract that creates a favorable first impression, learning to interact with the reader and promote one?s research is of vital importance.