A Study Of Abstract Writing In Master Theses In Electrical Engineering Based On The Cohesive Devices

English abstract is an indispensable part in an academic paper.With the increasing international academic exchanges,abstract has become one of the most significant media for academic exchanges.A normative abstract of the paper not only arouses the reader's interests but also helps the reader to obtain the main idea of the paper quickly.The previous researches on abstract discourse emphasize the genre analysis,yet few researches focus on the textual cohesive devices in abstract.Chinese scholars' research on abstract of paper mainly focused on the study of abstract writing in English major and E-C comparison.But they pay little attention to the dissertation in the field of engineering especially in electrical engineering.Cohesion plays a significant role in discourse coherence.In order to achieve the coherence of English abstracts,appropriate cohesive devices must be used to promote the coherence of the text.At present,many domestic scholars have applied cohesion theory to the study of improving English writing,but there are few studies on English abstract writing in master theses.Especially on the abstracts of engineering master's theses.Based on the theoretical framework of Halliday and Hasan's five major cohesive devices consisting of reference,substitution,ellipsis,conjunction and lexical cohesion.This thesis discusses the characteristics and errors of cohesive devices in the abstracts of the master theses in electrical engineering.According to this theory,the thesis randomly utilizes the 20 English abstracts from the 649 master's theses of electrical engineering in North China Electric Power University as a research corpus for analysis.In order to keep the corpus real-time,all samples are selected from2016-2018.Then,this paper adopts the method of qualitative,complemented with the method of quantitative.Quantitative analysis is mainly used to count the number and types of cohesive devices and cohesion errors.Qualitative analysis is used to analyze the characteristics and reasons of cohesive devices and cohesion errors used in the abstract samples.The result of the study shows that in the English abstract of the electrical engineering's master thesis in North China Electric Power University,the reference cohesion takes the highest frequency of all cohesive devices,followed by the conjunction cohesion.The ellipsis and lexical cohesion are few used in the abstract samples and the lowest frequency of all cohesive devices is the substitutioncohesion.In the analysis of the cohesion errors,the number of reference cohesion errors is the largest.Whereas the error rate of ellipsis cohesion is the highest.The major reasons for the cohesive errors are the students' unfamiliarity with the usage of cohesive devices and their literal translation from Chinese abstracts.By analyzing the electrical engineering master theses from the perspective of cohesive devices can not only verify and enrich the cohesion theory.It also has practical guiding significance for abstract writing of electrical engineering students' theses.