| In recent years,researchers have paid more and more attention to the research of English academic papers because it is helpful for learners to write more standard English academic papers,however,the research in this field mainly focuses on the macro textual level,the micro sentence level research is relatively rare.This study focuses on the descriptive sentence in the English academic papers of postgraduates,and is guided by the theory of contrastive rhetoric,through the self-built observation database Heilongjiang University Advanced Student Thesis Corpus(HLJUSP)and the reference database Michigan Advanced Student Thesis Corpus(MICUSP),and discusses the similarities and differences of descriptive sentence in English academic papers of Chinese and foreign postgraduates.The result shows that there are significant differences between the Chinese and foreign learners in the use of method-descriptive sentence and the data-descriptive sentence.First,in terms of voice,Chinese learners are better at using the active voice,while native speakers are better at using the passive voice to express themselves objectively.Second,compared with native speakers,Chinese learners are more inclined to use the first person,while native speakers are more inclined to use the third person;finally,Chinese learners’ sentence patterns don’t have relatively complex changes,while native speakers tend to convert different sentence patterns for expression.From the culture background,it is due to the Chinese tradition of humility,which make students used to use proactive expression to express one’s own viewpoint.Chinese learners tend to place an infinitive which indicating a target phrase at the beginning of a sentence when using a target sentence pattern;and Chinese learners’ use of sentence connectives is not as good as native speakers’;Chinese learners’ sentence are also prone to top-heavy sentences,and the sentence structure of native speakers is more balanced.These phenomena are related to the author’s cultural background,reader awareness,mode of thinking,and genre awareness.The research findings of this article have reference value for the teaching of academic English writing for graduate students,and also have certain reference significance for the theoretical research of academic discourse. |
