A Quantitative Study On Language Features Of English Abstracts Of Master’s Dissertations

As an important academic discourse,abstract plays an important role in academic research,arousing great interest among researchers.In recent years most scholars mainly study the abstract’s genre structure of a particular territory based on the theory of genre analysis.Few studies have been done on the English abstracts of master degree theses of Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics in China.This study will be significant for writing of master degree thesis and thesis writing teaching in this field.This study is guided by the guidance of the theoretical framework of genre analysis,this study analyzes the macro-structure and micro-linguistic features of English abstracts of master’s theses in Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics in China from 2010 to 2019.Based on self-built corpus,this study uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to annotate,calculate and analyze the English abstracts.The results show that:(1)In terms of macrostructure,most of the English abstracts in the corpus are in four step models,and only a handful of abstracts are lack of certain moves,which is basically consistent with the IMRD model proposed by Swales;(2)In terms of micro-linguistic features,the present tense and the past tense are the main types of English tense.The verb voice is mainly passive voice;When it comes to self-referencing in the use of first-person pronouns,the plural “we” is often used rather than the singular “I”.The research results are expected to help readers clearly see the standard English abstract writing format,and then guide them to write abstracts effectively,so as to improve the quality of the English abstract of the thesis writing.Additionally,by manually coding language errors of the English abstracts in the corpus and double checking them via Composition Correcting Website,the present study also classifies and exemplifies these errors,summarizing the reasons for them and providing suggestions for improvement.From the perspective of genre analysis,this study has made some new attempts to study the language characteristics of master thesis abstracts,which is of certain reference value to the writing and teaching of thesis abstracts.