A Contrastive Study Of Formality In English Scientific Papers By Chinese And American Writers

As a carrier of information exchange,scientific papers have a relatively high degree of formality.However,recent studies have found that the formality of English academic papers,esp.in hard sciences,is becoming progressively informal in recent years.This study aims to investigate whether Chinese writers' English scientific papers also show the same variation tendency.The purpose of our study is to shed light on identifying the differences of formality between scientific papers written by Chinese and American writers,and proposing rationalization suggestions for the internationalization of Chinese writers' scientific papers.To fully and closely determine the differences of scientific papers' formality of Chinese and American,this study attempts to analyze from the perspective of macro-structure and micro-grammatical features.The macro-structure analysis is based on a multilevel theoretical framework,using the computational tool,Coh-Metrix,to identify the differences on syntax and discourse of formality as compared to American scientific papers.This thesis conducts a contrastive corpus analysis from five dimension: referential cohesion,deep cohesion,narrativity,syntactic simplicity and word concreteness.The results suggest that scientific papers of Chinese are at a greater level of formality,higher referential cohesion and deep cohesion,but lower narrativity,syntactic simplicity and word concreteness compared with those written by American writers.Specifically,the results suggest that American writers' Lexical Diversity,first-person singular,Minimum Edit Distance of words,Minimum Edit Distance of part of speech and causal verbs are significantly and dramatically higher as compared with their American counterparts.However,the findings show that,the use of four items,causal connectives incidents,numbers of modifiers per noun phrase,log frequency forall words and words before the main verb,are significantly and dramatically higher for the Chinese compared to the American.To more broadly assess the discrepancies of text formality,this thesis further analyzes from the perspective of micro-grammatical features.The micro-grammatical features analysis is based on multidimensional and muti-feature approach created by Biber(1988).This thesis selects dimension one,labeled “involved versus informational production”,being closest to what we understand as informality and formality.A contrastive analysis is performed to investigate the potential differences on the linguistic features of dimension one.The results suggest a higher level of text formality of Chinese.American writers tend to produce more negative features in their writing of English scientific papers,such as,first person pronouns,present tense verbs,DO as pro-verb,causal adverbials conjunctions,demonstrative pronouns,possibility modals and so on.However,Chinese writers employ more agentless passive voices than American writers.This study demonstrates the differences of English scientific papers' formality between Chinese and American writers from the perspective of multilevel,multidimensional and muti-features.It is hoped that above findings will provide a slice of suggestions for Chinese writers to write fairly standard English scientific papers so as to increase recognition around the world.At the same time,we also hope that this study will promote the scientific and technological achievements spreading and communication around the world.