A Comparative Study On Metadiscursive Nouns In Moves Of English Abstracts Of Science Academic Journals Published In China And Abroad

This thesis mainly studies the application of metadiscursive nouns in English abstracts of academic journals at home and abroad.“Metadiscourse” was coined by Zellig Harris(1959),which means “the self-reflective linguistic material in texts does not add anything to the propositional content but the discourse about discourse”.(Crismore,1993;Hyland,2004).Jiang and Hyland(2016,2017)put forward the concept of metadiscursive nouns on the basis of metadiscourse: it refers to the organization of the discourse or the readers' understanding of it.As a part of abstract nouns,metadiscoursive nouns have both constant meanings and contextual pragmatic meanings(such as fact,attitude,idea,etc.),which play important roles in the English abstracts of researches.In fact,nominalization is one major type of metadiscursive nouns occurring in the “th-+ noun” pattern(Yoon C.,2017).As an effective cohesive device,nominalization can serve information by packaging the clause or sentence which shows in the previous discourse into a single noun or convert verbs or adjectives into nouns.Nominalization shares a lot of similarities with the concept of metadiscursive nouns: both of them are cohesive devices and stance expressions.The two dominating concentrations of related metadiscursive nouns researches are descriptive researches and empirical researches.The descriptive researches mainly start from the theoretical perspective of collocation patterns,functions and classifications of metadiscursive nouns,including the exploration of lexico-grammatical patterns generalization,discourse cohesion and coherence,pragmatics and cognitive functions.The empirical researches are mostly comparative analyses of academic English writing from the perspective of application,including the comparison of different registers or the comparison of academic discourse that written by the writers in the same register with different English abilities,for example,the comparison of researches in the hard disciplines with those in soft disciplines,the comparison of published researches and graduates' theses in English as a second foreign language,the comparison of graduates' theses and postgraduates' theses in English major and so on.Obviously,most of the existing empirical researches take the whole discourse as the research carrier to explore the use of metadiscursive nouns.And the English abstract of the researches,as the thumbnail of the research,is increasingly responsible for promoting the interaction between writers and readers and promoting the international academic exchanges.However,there are few researches on metadiscursive nouns in abstract,let alone the researches on the combination of metadiscursive nouns and nominalizations based on the macro structure of English abstract-move.Since the English scientific journals published in China have become the main force for Chinese journals to “go out” to the world,this study not only compares the Chinese Journals with the foreign journals,but adds the English journals published in China.In view of that the science researches occupy a large proportion in international academic exchanges,and the lexical-grammatical pattern “this/these + metadiscursive noun” is frequently used in researches(Gray & Cortes,2011),it is worth exploring that the similarities and differences in the use of metadiscursive nouns under the pattern of “this/these + metadiscursive noun” in English abstract moves of science journals at home and abroad,as well as the relationship between metadiscursve nouns and nominalizations,and the features of metadiscursive nouns in such discourse.Specifically,2430 English abstracts are randomly selected from 27 science field journals in three years(2016-2018),and three parallel corpora are built,namely Chinese journals corpus(CC),English journals published in China corpus(ECC),and English journals published abroad corpus(EAC)from the American and British presses with high impact factors.The IPMRC moves model,proposed by Dos Santos(1996)and Hyland(2004)et al.is used to manually classify and code these corpora.The corpus software AntConc(Version 3.4.4)is used as the research tool.By combining qualitative and quantitative methods,the horizontal and the vertical comparisons are made to analyze frequency and distribution of those patterns in five moves.And the proportion of nominalizations in metadiscursive nouns should be calculated when the nominalizations are collected from the retrieved metadiscursive nouns manually.Finally,the functional classification model developed by Jiang and Hyland(2015)(Table 2.1)is used to identified metadiscursive nouns to show the similarities and differences between Chinese and foreign journals on stance expressions and evaluations.The specific research questions are as follows:(1)How frequently does the “this/these + metadiscursive noun” lexicogrammatical pattern of metadiscrusive nouns occur in different moves of the three corpora? And in the three corpora,what is the proportion of nominalizations in metadiscursive nouns?(2)How are metadiscursive nouns used to express stance in different moves respectively?In response to the above research questions,the calculated data show that there are obvious similarities in the moves distribution of CC,ECC and EAC.However,there are differences in the use of metadiscursive nouns,namely,(1)In terms of frequency of metadiscursive nouns,CC and ECC are significantly different from those of EAC.The frequency of metadiscursive nouns in CC is similar to that in ECC,but the frequency of metadiscursive nouns in EAC is about 1.5 times of that in first two.Comparing the three corpora,metadiscursive nouns are mainly used in the method and result moves,but the use of metadiscursive nouns in the introduction and the purpose moves is significantly higher in EAC than in CC and ECC.In CC,ECC and EAC,nominalization accounts for 26.74%,26.83% and 40.84% of metadiscursive nouns respectively.Specifically,the frequency of metadiscursive nouns and nominalizations under the pattern of “this/these + metadiscursive noun” in CC is similar to that of ECC.The frequency of the metadiscursive nouns and its subset nominalizations under the “this/these + metadiscursive noun” pattern showed in English abstracts of EAC is more than that of CC and ECC.(2)In general,in the three dimensions of the entity,attribute and relation of metadiscursive nouns classifications,the most common one is the entity nouns,followed by the attribute nouns,and finally relation nouns.The abstracts of EAC use the three dimensions of metadiscursive nouns more frequently than CC and ECC.The frequency of metadiscursive nouns showed in ECC is higher than that of CC in terms of entity and relation,except the attribute dimension which describes the characteristics of things.However,from the perspective of moves structure,in the introduction move of English abstract,the frequency of using metadiscursive nouns in ECC is the lowest in both entity and attribute dimensions.In terms of the purpose and method moves,the use frequency of entity metadiscursive nouns in EAC,ECC and CC decrease successively.In the moves of result and conclusion,the frequency of metadiscursive nouns marked as entity and attribute showed in ECC is slightly higher than that in EAC,and much higher than that in CC.Based on the above findings,this study concludes that there is a large distance between the domestic science journals and the foreign English science journals in terms of the frequency of the metadiscursive nouns and nominalizations and the stance expression in the three dimensions of entity,attribute and relation of metadiscursive nouns.Although the domestic English journals are slightly better than the domestic Chinese journals in some areas,there is still a certain gap with the foreign English journals from the American and British presses.It is hoped that the results of this study can provide reference for the practice of English abstracts writing of scientific researches in China,and enhance the awareness of science researchers in metadiscursive nouns,so as to promote their academic English writing level and accelerate the internationalization process of their academic achievements.The results of this study also provide empirical research results for academic English writing and teaching in China,which is conducive to the further refinement of teachers' academic English writing guidance.At the same time,this study is also a useful supplement to the research of metadiscursive nouns at home and abroad,which has both theoretical value and practical significance.