语言类和数学类国内核心期刊学术摘要对比分析-comparative analysis of academic abstracts of domestic core journals of language and mathematics.docxVIP

AbstractAs the miniature of the research article, an abstract is an important genre which serves as a time-saving device for readers’ quickly capturing the main points of the whole paper, and by means of which the writers can keep up with advances in their fields and promote their new knowledge within academic community. Yet, despite the important communicative functions they serve, the abstracts continue to remain a neglected field among discourse analysis. Though there have been some genre studies on the rhetorical organization of the research article abstracts and their stylistic features, as for linguistic and mathematic research article abstracts analysis, it is still scarce.In this paper, the corpora were randomly selected from 5 key journals of linguistics and 5 of mathematics in 2005 respectively, then 39 linguistic journal article abstracts in English were selected, corresponding with 39 journal article abstracts written in Chinese, and 45 mathematic journal article abstracts in English corresponding with 45 mathematic journal article abstracts in Chinese. Bhatia’s (1993) four-move pattern of PMRC (purpose, method, results, and conclusion) was employed in identifying the semantic units in this study. The linguistic feature of lexis was also examined.The results show that some degree of variation exists despite a certain degree of homogeneity between the abstracts of linguistics and those of mathematics. The main findings are as follows:① The discourse structure of both linguistic and mathematic journal articleabstracts is five-move pattern—Background-Purpose-Method-Results-Conclusion. Among the five-move pattern, M1 (background) is absent in Bhatia’s (1993) pattern. This means Chinese writers like to put background introduction as an important part in the abstract writing.② Comparing linguistic journal article abstracts with mathematic journal articleabstracts, linguistic journal article abstracts emphasize more on M1 (background) both in English a