（英语语言文学专业论文）科技英语的文体特征及其在科技文摘中的表现形式.pdf

1 acknowledgement i would like here to express my profound thanks to my supervisor, professor deng mingde, who throughout the course my writing the thesis, has given me great help with his extreme patience and conscientiousness. my work owes so much to his constant encouragement, enlightening comments and valuable suggestions. in writing this paper, i have cited from and referred to some works in this field. to all those authorsmy thanks. finally, i would like to express my gratitude to my parents and my husband for their consistent encouragement and moral support. 1 introduction in the present world of information explosion, there is an obvious need to improve the communication of information. scientists, researches and science and technology students need to have a rapid, effective and efficient way to obtain information. since chinas opening to the outside world, chinese researchers and science and technology students have had much access to a much larger amount of foreign technical literature, including journals, textbooks, and papers, etc. most of which are published in english. to keep up with the new developments in their own field, researchers and students have to be acquainted with the ever-increasing amount of the relevant literature. however, there are two difficulties lying before them. first, the volume of the literature makes this work formidable. secondly, their foreign language proficiency is so inadequate that they cannot read much of the foreign literature available to them in a short span of time. in order to keep up with the developments in the fields of science and technology in the outside world, researchers have to use surrogates, principally abstracts, which may help save about nine-tenths of the time needed for the original documents on the one hand, and broaden the scope of reading by a factor of 10 on the other. abstracts also faciliate literature searches. because of the large amount of literature and the relatively poor language proficiency of the chinese researchers before reading original papers these can save time and improve their efficiency. 2 abstracts also help to overcome the language barrier. according to borko and bernier (1975) , there are about 70 languages in which papers of science and engineering appear. most chinese have learned only one foreign language: english, or russian, or german, or japanese, very few can read literature in two or more foreign languages. the chemical abstracts, for example, publish abstracts written in english, french, german, japanese and many other languages. they enable the students to get access to papers whose language they are not familiar with. a good abstract helps the writer to spread his ideas. the most widely used abstracts are in english. according to the standard for science and technology magazine formulated by the united nations, educational, scientific and cultural organization, every formally published paper, whether it is written in english or not, should be accompanied by an english abstract. in this country, most scientific journals and conference proceedings require that papers in chinese be accompanied by english abstracts as well. ones research may be lost to the scientific world altogether if titles and abstracts are so poorly written that no one can retrieve the information hidden within them. thus, chinese researchers and science students must have two essential skills. the first is the skill of reading science and technology literature in english to get as much information as possible. the second is that of writing well-organized, standard and informative abstracts to enunciate their ideas and make their work known. 3 part one general survey of est (writings) 1.1 definition of est english for science and technology (abbreviated to est), as the term suggests, is the english describing scientific and technical matters, strictly speaking, est discourse covers the area of written english that extends from the peer writing of scientists and technically oriented professionals to the writing aimed at skilled technicians. peer writing is exemplified by books and articles written by experts in one field for other experts in the same field or for experts in a related field. skilled technicians are those who differ from engineers in the same field only in that they sometimes lack comparable training in theory. the spectrum (chart1.1) suggests a clear-cut distinction between english for academic purpose (eap) on the one side and english for occupational purpose (eop) on the other. however, a good deal of overlap exists between the two: an electronics engineer and a skilled electronics technician, for example, have a good deal of the same technical language in common and both may rely on the same service manuals for much of their work in the laboratory. at the same time there will be many discourse units they do not share-the engineer will make use of theoretically oriented texts often heavily laced with quite abstruse mathematics, while the technician will have no reason to consult these types of texts. further, the engineer will read journals that are of interest to him but would not be so to most technicians. similarly, the 4 technician will often deal with manuals of little interest or use to the engineer. whatever the differences between those operating at either end of the spectrum, neither end is better; each simply represents written est discourse with some (but hardly all!) different characteristics. such differences exist in most scientific and technical fields. one possible perspective on these differences can be seen in chart1.2, which shows one possible breakdown of academic and occupational fields. in sum, est covers the areas of english written for academic and professional purposes and of english written for occupational (and vocational) purpose, including the often informally written discourse found in trade journals and in scientific and technical materials written for the layman. chart1.1 spectrum of types of discourse learning texts peer writing advanced intermediate elementary basic instruction technician writing chart 1.2 eap eop est fields est occupations 1. engineering 1. engineering technician 2. forestry 2. electronics 3. computer science 3. laboratory 4. electronics 4. plumbers 5. medicine 5.mechanics 6.mining 6. computer operators 7. dietetics etc. 5 1.2 major types of est writings 1) abstracts an abstract is a brief account giving the chief points of a longer piece of writing. it makes it easier for readers to get at the main ideas so that they can decide whether or not to read the whole article. generally speaking, there are two types of abstracts. one is the descriptive abstract, which states only the general subject matter of a paper or report, with no or little specific details. it is usually very short, containing simply one, two or more sentences. the other type is the informational abstract which is an expanded version of the descriptive abstract. it offers essential information instead of specific details about a theory, especially about a formal report, an experimental or theoretical study. it usually consists of one paragraph, or at most two or more coherent paragraphs, ranging from 50 to 250 words. 2) scientific treatises a scientific treatise or research paper is usually a formal, fairly long and well-documented article that describes, explains, narrates or discusses facts, ideas or theories and persuades or convinces beliefs, or presents questions and answers in combination of description, exposition, narration and argumentation. 3) standard standardization is a comprehensive science of researching technical standard, administrative work standard, quality standard 6 and their functioning. and standardization is usually realized by standard documents, such as technical standard, administrative standard and the similar documents. now, there are about 30 countries having national organizations for its standardization. they also have their standard code, for example, bs stands for england, ansi for america, csa for canada, as for australia. beside, there are many international standards, such as iso, iec,who, etc. therefore standard documents are an important part in est writings. 4) patent specification patent is an official document giving the holder the sole right to make, use or sell an invention and preventing others from imitating it. generally speaking, patent documents refer to patent specification, patent abstracts, and index of patent etc. a patent specification usually includes forward part, body (introduction, background of the invention, summary of the invention, brief description of drawing, description of the preferred embodiments etc.), and claim. 1.3 review of research in est research in english for science and technology (est) has developed in two directions: 1.characteristics of est in general; 2.characteristics of the varieties with est. much research has been done into the language of science and technology in the first direction 7 and a great deal of research into it is going on at present. the research may be divided into two groups (lee, 1978:6): (i) on the level of the sentence: (a) huddleston, hudson, winter and henrici; (b) simpson; (c) barber and (d) mcconochie; (ii) on the level of the paragraph or “connected discourse”: (a) selinker, trimble, vroman and lackstrom; (b) gopnik; (c) widdowson and (d) jones. the first group of projects is corpus-based studies of the linguistic properties of scientific english. the sentence is the basic unit of analysis and the immediate aim is purely descriptive. although these studies throw interesting light on the linguistic features of scientific english (in terms of relative frequency of occurrence), they do not examine the ways in which the understanding of the linguistic features would help in expressing certain content. in other words, these studies have little pedagogical significance. secondly, scientific texts are examined as a whole, without making my definite provision for differences among varieties of scientific english. the second group of projects is based on selected passages. the main purpose is to investigate the relationship between grammatical choice and rhetoric function in english for science and technology. the areas of grammar covered by lackstrom and others are limited to articles, tense choices, modal uses and passive construction. the aim of their research is to go beyond syntactic choice made in terms of the single sentence into rhetorical choice based on elements and cues beyond the bounds of the single sentence. the rhetorical training process hopes to 8 encourage “the early and effective use of prediction to help grasp the overall rhetorical plan that organizes the meaning of a text” (lee, 1978:6). few efforts have been made to relate the grammatical choice and rhetoric function in est with the skills of technical writing. like the first group of researchers, these researchers examine various types of scientific texts as a whole. no attempt is made to differentiate texts of different varieties of scientific english. the focuses are on est in general, the mainstay of all kinds of scientific english, with little or no consideration of the different characteristics resulting from the differences in purposes, fields, subjects or disciplines. apart from the general characteristics, scientific english demonstrates distinct characteristics resulting from the difference in reader groups, functions, and purposes. for example, the language in giving instructions for performing an experiment and the language for stating the result are different in that the former employs more imperative sentences and uses more verbs in the active voice and in the present tense, while the latter uses more declarative sentences and more verbs in the past tense (wang hardly any linguistic studies have been made systematically in this area. 10 part two stylistic characteristics of est compared with general english and literary english, est possesses something both common and different in style. according to the definition by the well-known linguist prof. geoffrey n. leech of lancaster university of u.k., style is the ways of using a certain language by a certain person in a certain situation for a certain purpose. in the long process of the development of the language, est has evolved features of its own in style, vocabulary and linguistic rules. the purpose of est is to convey the latest information on science and technology and to exchange news of achievements in a field of science and technical research. hence, the language used in scientific writings at large should be accurate, objective, concise and clear. from the analysis of a great deal of scientific and technical literature, we can find that scientific writings embrace the following seven characteristics: impersonal, formal in mode of speech, objective and accurate in statement, standard in language, unadorned in style, strict in logic and concentrated in technical terms. this chapter will be devoted to the study of these characteristics from a stylistic point of view. before the discussion in detail, lets look at two examples. e.g. 2.1 the atom is the smallest particle of an element that can have a separate existence or take part in a chemical reaction. the atom was once thought to be an entity of homogeneous composition; incapable of being split into smaller fractions and composed of unalterable substance characteristic of the particular element. but the atoms of 11 every element are now known to be composite structures of three sub-atomic particles the election which carries a unit negative electrical charge, the proton which carries a unit positive electrical charge and the neutron which is electrically neutral. all atoms have a very small nucleus composed of the relatively massive protons and neutrons packed closely together. around the nucleus there are shells of the relatively very light electrons. as electrons and protons carry equal but opposite electrical charges, the numbers of electrons in the shell of a normal atom is equal to the number of protons in the nucleus. all the 100 or more chemical elements now known are built up of the same three sub-atomic particles. each element is character5ized by the number of protons in the nuclei of its atoms: thus hydrogen, the lightest element, has one proton in its atom; helium has two while uranium, one of the heaviest element, has a nucleus of 92 protons together with a still larger number of neutrons. it should therefore be possible to change atoms of one element into atoms of other element the alchemists dream by bombarding them with suitable projectiles. the best projectiles for this purpose were found to be neutrons. their mass enables them to piece the shells of electrons and their small size and electrical neutrality enables them to penetrate the nucleus itself. once inside the nucleus the intruding neutron may cause a restructuring of the rearrangement of protons and neutrons without causing outward disturbance; in this case, the neutron is absorbed and an isotopic atom of the element is formed. but the intruding neutrons may alternatively disrupt the heavy nucleus, causing it to disintegrate into two or more parts which then become the atoms of two or more different elements; a transmutation of an element has occurred. when heavy atoms are split in this way some loss of mass occurs and this loss of mass is converted into an equivalent quantity of energy according to einsteins law e=mc2 where c is the velocity of light. (from bbc) e.g. 2.2 it is said that mathematics is the base of all other sciences, and that arithmetic, the science of numbers, is the base of mathematics. numbers consists of whole numbers (integers) which are formed by the digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 and by combinations of them. for example, 247 two hundred and forty seven is a number 12 formed by three digits. parts of numbers smaller than 1 are sometimes expressed in terms of fractions, but in scientific usage they are given as decimals. this is because it is easier to perform the various mathematical operations if decimals are used instead of fractions. the main operations are: to add, subtract, multiply and divide; to square, cube or raise to any other root and to find a ratio or proportion between pairs of numbers of a series of numbers. thus, the decimal, or ten-scale system is used for scientific purpose throughout the world, even in countries whose national system of weights and measurements are based upon other scales. the other scale in general use nowadays is the binary, or two-scales, in which numbers are expressed by combinations of only two digits, 0 and 1. thus, in the binary scale, 2 is expressed as 010, 3 is given as 011, 4 is represented as 100, etc. this scale is perfectly adapted to the “on-off” pulses of electricity, so it is widely used in electronic computers: because its simplicity it is often called “the lazy schoolboys dream”. other branches of mathematics such as algebra and geometry are also extensively used in many sciences and even in some areas of extensively used in many sciences and even in some areas of philosophy. more specialized extensions, such as probability theory and group theory, are now applied to an increasing range of activities, from economics and the design of experiments to war and politics.(from ewer j r er al. a course in basic scientific english) from the analysis of the two scientific articles (and many other est writings) we can discern the following characteristics: 2.1 impe