A Comparative Study Of The Genres Of English Abstracts In Chinese And Foreign Linguistics Doctoral Dissertation

As an important writing text,abstract summarizes the research emphasis of an article.At the same time,abstracts are regarded as the key information for publishing and retrieving articles and have certain communicative purposes.An excellent abstract can stimulate readers’ interest in reading and improve the attention of the article.However,the English abstracts written by some Chinese scholars are not perfect enough,which to some extent hinders the international dissemination of the research results of Chinese scholars.Therefore,based on the English abstracts written by Chinese and foreign linguistics Ph D students,this thesis analyzes the macro-genre structure of both sides under the Genre Analysis Theory,and analyzes the micro-linguistic features of both sides under the framework of Biber’s Multidimensional Analysis,and compares the differences and connections between the two sides.This thesis draws the following conclusions: Chinese scholars tend to use a five step structure,which is Introduction-Purpose-Method-Structure-Evaluation,while most abstracts written by foreign scholars use a four step structure,which is Purpose-Method-Result-Conclusion.At the micro level,there are obvious differences in language features between Chinese learners and native speakers when writing each move,and the lexical richness of native speakers’ abstracts is significantly higher than that of Chinese learners.Specifically,learners tend to use language features such as Sentence relatives,Be as the main verb,and Phrasal coordination more frequently.However,subordinate features,such as Conditional adverbial subordinators,Causative adverbial subordinators,that-clause,persuasive verbs and First person pronouns,are more often found in English abstracts written by native speakers.The main reason for the differences between the two corpora is due to the different requirements of academic writing standards,and the influence of native language transfer on learners.This thesis aims to deepen readers’ understanding of Genre Analysis Theory and Multidimensional Analysis,with the hope that the research results will help linguists improve their ability to write English abstracts and provide references for the teaching of academic paper writing.