| A foreign language abstract(usually an abstract in English version)should be attached to scientific and technical reports,dissertations and scientific papers for the purpose of international exchanges.An abstract is a condensation of a full document,which provides a descriptive guide to the major points of the document for readers.However,it is difficult for Chinese students to write an English abstract,in which there are numerous linguistic errors.The objective of the study is to explore the errors exist in English abstracts of Transport Engineering Masters'Theses.The English Abstract Corpus of Transport Engineering Masters' Theses was established by collecting 500 English abstracts written by Transport Engineering masters from Dalian Maritime University,Shanghai Maritime University and Wuhan University of Technology.Lexical and syntactic errors in these abstracts were analyzed based on error analysis with the assistance of Antconc3.2.1w.The focus of the study was the top three types of lexical errors and syntactic errors.The distribution features and possible causes of these errors were analyzed in this research as well.The results show that the top three types of lexical errors are errors in articles,verbs,and nouns,which respectively account for 26.97%,22.73%,and 19.66%.Article errors are further divided into three subtypes;verb errors include eight subcategories;noun errors contain seven subtypes.Possible causes of lexical errors are mother-tongue influence,over-generalization,and ignorance of rule restrictions.The top four types of syntactic errors are successively structural deficiency,run-on sentences and sentence fragments,which respectively occupy 43.63%,19.05%and 13.23%.The structural deficiency comprises three subgroups;run-on sentences are further divided into six subtypes;sentence fragments consist of three subcategories.Possible causes of syntactic errors are mother-tongue influence,ignorance of rule restrictions and the influence of Chinese thinking mode. |
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