A Contrastive Study On Moves And Lexical Bundles Of English Abstracts In Chinese And English Accounting Journals

English abstract is an essential part in academic discourse because it plays an important role in research article writing and publication,information retrieval and academic communication.With the accounting convergence in China and the international world,Chinese scholars publish more and more research articles in English accounting journals for academic communication.There may exist different requirements in abstract writings in Chinese and English accounting journals.In order to write highquality abstracts and have efficient academic communication with the rest of the world so as to promote the development of Chinese accounting research,it is necessary for Chinese scholars especially for the scholars in the field of accounting to understand the macro structure and linguistic features of abstracts in English accounting journals.Therefore,it is of great necessity to conduct a contrastive study on moves and lexical bundles of English abstracts in Chinese and English accounting journals and find out how the lexical bundles realize the communicative purposes of moves in abstracts in accounting journals.Specifically,the study aims to answer the following three research questions:(1)What are the similarities and differences in the frequency and distribution of moves and lexical bundles in English abstracts in Chinese and English accounting journals?(2)How do lexical bundles realize the communicative purposes of moves in English abstracts in Chinese and English accounting journals?(3)What are the possible factors contributing to the observed similarities and differences?In order to address above research questions,600 abstracts are selected respectively from Chinese and English accounting journals to build two corpora,namely,Chinese accounting corpus(CAC)and English accounting corpus(EAC).With the aid of Ant Conc,under the guidance of Bhatia’s(1993)Introduction-Methodology-ResultsConclusion(IMRC)model and taking Biber et al.’s(1999)structural taxonomy and Hyland’s(2008a)functional taxonomy of lexical bundles as references,the study analyzes the use of moves and lexical bundles in English abstracts in Chinese and English accounting journals.The results show that(1)Chinese and English scholars share some common features in their abstracts,both of them lay more emphasis on the use of move 2 and move 3 in their abstracts;however,abstracts in EAC have more complete structure for containing three or four moves in abstract writing.Besides,Chinese scholars use more lexical bundles and use them more frequently in their abstracts.And there is a significant difference between the two corpora in the use of some sub-categories of structural and functional lexical bundles.(2)There are some move-specific bundles in the two corpora which help realize the communicative purpose of each move.As for the distribution of lexical bundles in each move,more lexical bundles appear in move 2 and move 3 in CAC while more appear in move 3 and move 4 in EAC.(3)The similarities found in the two corpora can be explained through the shared genre and discipline in these two corpora,while the reasons for differences between the two corpora can be summarized into three aspects: differences in culture,language habits and language cognition between Chinese and English scholars.This study has important theoretical and practical implications.Theoretically,the study enriches the scope and content of genre analysis and lexical bundles study and propels corpus study of lexical bundles in the genre of research articles.Practically,through this study,on one hand,Chinese scholars especially the scholars in the field of accounting can better understand the moves and lexical bundles used in abstracts in English accounting journals so that they can construct their abstracts correctly and properly use the lexical bundles in their abstract writings.On the other hand,the list of identified lexical bundles of abstracts in accounting journals can provide teachers with useful information for English for specific purposes(ESP)and English for academic purposes(EAP)class material development.