A Comparative Study On Lxical Chunks In English Abatracts Of Academic Journals By Chinese And Japanese Efl Writers And Native English Writers

English abstract is a thumbnail of the paper.It helps readers quickly grasp the content and frame of the article.It is also a ruler to measure whether the paper conforms to the international academic writing norms.Therefore,it is of great significance for the research of the abstract.In recent years,research on abstract writing has drawn more and more attention from the scholars,especially from the perspective of lexical chunks or genres.Most of the previous research focuses on the differences in lexical chunks of English writing between Chinese and American writers,while the studies of the differences in lexical chunks of English abstracts written by Chinese and Japanese writers and native writers are few.With a corpus-based research method,this study conducts a cross-language comparison on the basis of the previous research.One hundred and fifty English abstracts of academic journals written by Chinese,Japanese and native writers are collected to build three parallel corpora which are Corpus CA,Corpus JA and Corpus EA.The abstracts of Chinese writers are from CNKI and the abstracts of Japanese and native writers are from Proquest database.Based on Nattinger and Decarrico’s lexical chunk theory,this research uses SPSS software to analyze the characteristics of the lexical chunks in English abstracts of academic journals written by Chinese,Japanese and native writers,and further explores the reasons for the differences in the hope of finding out the possible relationship between lexical chunks and abstract writing.The research results show that: first,differences do exist in the use of lexical chunks by different language groups.The use of lexical chunks between Chinese and Japanese writers is far less than that of native writers,and these differences also exist in the frequency and proportion of lexical chunks.Second,there are differences in the use of polywords,phrasal constraints and sentence builders for Chinese and Japanese writers and native writers.Compared with Chinese and Japanese writers,native writers use more phrasal constraints and sentence builders in the abstracts,while Chinese and Japanese writers tend to use more polywords.The research results will help to provide some inspiration for future academic English writing and lexical chunks learning,and help more Chinese and Japanese writers to better improve their English abstract writing.