A Contrastive Genre Analysis On Introduction Sections Of Research Articles In English And Chinese Agricultural Engineering Journals

Introduction,as an indispensable part of research articles(RAs),plays an vital role in summarizing existing research results,proposing research gaps,and introducing research topics.As a genre bearing certain communicative purpose,the research article introduction(RAI)has specific generic structures.At present,there are few genre studies of RAIs on comprehensive discipline,among which agricultural engineering,as an emerging comprehensive discipline and a key discipline of our university,has great research value in terms of generic feature.In this paper,RAIs of agricultural engineering are selected as the research object,and 60 RAIs from five Chinese and English agricultural engineering journals with high impact factors in 2016-2018 are randomly selected to establish two corpora.Following the CARS model,this paper conducts a genre study of English and Chinese RAIs in agricultural engineering,intending to explore their macro-generic structure and micro-linguistic features and illustrate similarities and differences between them as well as the reasons behind these similarities and differences to further reveal the rules of textual organization of RAIs in agricultural engineering.The major research findings are as follows:(1)Regarding macro-generic structure,RAIs in both corpora are apt to realize their communicative purposes through three moves(M1,M2,M3).But significant differences exist in the frequency of some steps,including M1-step1(claiming centrality),M3-step1A(outlining purposes),M3-step2(proposing hypothesis).Authors of English RAIs tend to adopt author-responsible way of writing to elaborate viewpoints and research purpose,propose hypothesis directly,and present reasoning process whereas authors of Chinese RAIs are inclined to employ reader-responsible way of writing and they are very cautious to propose hypothesis,and the research theme as well as purpose are to be summarized by readers.As for move patterns,English RAIs tend to employ cyclic move patterns(M1-M2-M1-M3,M1-M2-M1-M2-M3,M1-M3-M1-M2-M3)while Chinese RAIs are mainly conducted with the three-move pattern(M1-M2-M3).In addition,a distinctive step of describing geographical features related to agriculturalengineering discipline is found in both corpora.As experiments of agricultural engineering are mostly carried out in the field,geographical characteristics are an important factor affecting the research.(2)Regarding micro-linguistic features,citations in English RAIs mainly distribute in M2(establishing research space)indicating research gaps while in Chinese RAIs mainly in M1(establishing the scope of research)to review previous studies.Since agricultural engineering is a discipline based on the presentation of objective facts,non-integral citations account for a large proportion in both corpora with frequencies of 88.91% and 66.67%.There is no obvious difference in lexical diversity between the two corpora.As for reporting verbs,to highlight objectivity of the research,other-reporting verbs occupy a large proportion in both corpora with the percentages of 73.94% and 65.39%.In addition,the choice of reporting verbs is relatively narrow in Chinese RAIs due to some expressions in Chinese that are specifically used to state viewpoints.The results of this study indicate that agricultural engineering RAIs present distinctive generic characteristics related to the discipline and their differences in writing between English and Chinese are mainly influenced by writing styles and thinking patterns in different languages.This research would provide practical suggestions both for genre studies on RAIs and the teaching of RAIs writing in the field of agricultural engineering.