Metadiscourse Study Of Generative Features In Post-graduate Theses English Abstracts

With the continuous academic exchanges among countries,English writing has drawn more and more attention as an important step to strengthen academic exchanges among countries and promote the establishment of an academic stage.The ingenious and correct use of discourse resources in discourse plays an important role in the structure of the article,the promotion of scientific research results,and the clear expression of the author's attitude and position.Metadiscourse is a self-reflective linguistic expression that refers to the interaction of the text,the author,and the imaginary reader.As one of the discourse resources,it can not only effectively organize the discourse perfectly,but also form a flexible interactive relationship between the author and the reader.At present,the related research on student writing,mostly focus on the vocabulary,grammar and sentence level.Although some of the research have turned their direction to the text level,they are still limited to the description of writers' language skills and content and ignore the interaction between the writer and the reader in writing.It can be seen that metadiscourse is an effective bridge between the reader and the writer which plays a vital role.As an important part of scientific terminology,abstract writing is the essence of the content of the article.However,most of the research on abstracts in academia currently focuses on the step or genre,there are little research of metadiscourse in abstracts.The generative features of abstracts refer to the acquisition of meaning and the construction of self subject by the interaction between the reader and the author during the writing process and let the author,the reader and the article enter a new realm.Different from the previous writing methods that only focus on the composition of words and sentences,generative writing pays attention to the communication and interaction inthe writing process and the construction of self-subject which challenges the rigid way of writing.Therefore,according to Hyland's metadiscourse framework,the English abstracts of50 classic post-graduate theses from Yan'an University are selected as corpus.In addition,in order to avoid the limitations and one-sidedness of the research,the theses selected in this research are originated from 10 different majors,including philosophy,medicine,literature,history,science,economics,education,law,engineering,and management.In each discipline,5 post-graduate theses are randomly selected as research objects.What's more,this study does not use traditional software for mechanical analysis,but analyzes it manually.Through the research,it is found that first,the use of metadiscourse in post-graduate English theses abstract are frequent and can help the author communicate the writing intention and establish the interpersonal relationship between the author and the reader,so as to improve the writing ability of English abstract.Second,in the use of each subclass of metadiscourse,self-mentions and transitions are the most frequently used while attitude markers and endophoric markers are the least used.Third,the interactional metadiscourse is slightly more than the interactive metadiscourse,indicating that college students are more inclined to help readers grasp the arguments in abstract writing.According to the analysis of the generative features in post-graduate theses English abstracts from the perspective of metadiscourse,it is conducive to the objective,accurate and scientific summary of the main information of dissertations in the process of writing and translating abstracts of master's dissertations,and to use more academic and standardized language to present them.