| Based on one of the subsystems of appraisal theory—graduation system,the current study aimed to make a contrastive analysis of the force and focus resources between the introductions in social sciences journal articles and those in natural sciences journal articles.Two major questions were addressed in the present study: 1.Is there any quantitative difference in the use of graduation resources between the introductions in social sciences journal articles and those in natural sciences journal articles? 2.Is there any difference in the distributional pattern of graduation resources between the introductions in social sciences journal articles and those in natural sciences journal articles?In the present study,60 social sciences journal articles introductions and 60 natural sciences journal articles introductions,each with a length of 600-800 words,were compared and analyzed in light of the quantitative use and the distributional pattern of graduation resources.The quantitative use of graduation resources in both the introductions in social sciences journal articles and natural sciences journal articles were compared by independent sample t-test.The differences in distributional pattern were presented according to the distributional composition and distributional evenness.The results showed that the employments of force and focus resources between the introductions in social sciences journal articles and those in natural sciences journal articles were significantly different.The amount of employment of graduation resources in social sciences journal articles introductions was higher than in natural sciences journal articles introductions.Specifically,the use of attribute intensification,extent quantification,specificity and actualization resources in the two corpora was significantly different.However,other resources of graduation system were not significantly different.As for the distributional pattern,there were significant differences between social sciences journal articles introductions and natural sciences journal articles introductions.Specifically,the employment of amount quantification was different in both distributional composition and distributional evenness.However,the distributional pattern presented that the uses of graduation,force,focus,intensification,quantification,attribute intensification,process intensification,extent quantification,valeur,fulfillment,completion,specificity and actualization resources in both social and natural sciences journal article introductions were parallels in distributional composition but differences in distributional evenness.The present study provides a new perspective for the contrastive study of social and natural sciences journal articles introductions and expands the application boundary of graduation resources.Besides,the findings of the study can not only help people learn something about graduation system as well as its subsystems better but also help Chinese scholars employ graduation resources appropriately in their English academic articles. |
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