（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）中外英语期刊引言部分的对比研究.pdf

iv 摘 要 随着中国科学技术的发展在中国出现了越来越多种的英语学术期刊这些英 语学术期刊在向世界展示中国最新的理论和发现方面扮演了一个非常重要的角色 现在在中国一共有超过 1 8 6种英语学术期刊而其中只有 3 6种期刊被 s c i和 e i 索引收录这种情况表明中国英语学术期刊未能跟上国际水平造成这种状况的一 个很重要的原因就是中国学者在学术论文写作时的英语水平没能达到要求 英语学术论文中一个很重要的部分就是论文的开头引言部分引言部分一共有 三个语步第一个语步是建立研究领域该语步阐述该论题的重要性总结论题 和进行文献综述第二个语步是建立研究空白对前人研究或提出反对或指出不 足或提出新的问题或延续前人研究语步三是占领研究空白该研究的目的 主要描述发现和论文结构都将在呈现在这一语步中引言写得好坏与否将在很 大程度上影响到这篇论文是否能被录用 虽然语言学家已经在相关领域进行了一定的研究但是对于中外英语期刊上英 语引言语篇层面上的对比研究比较少因此有必要对中国英语期刊和国际英语期 刊上的引言部分进行对比研究 本研究从字系特征语步和主位结构三个角度对比中外英语期刊上引言部分语 篇方面的异同分析产生这种异同的原因 本研究主要采用语料库研究方法随机从中国英语期刊和国外英语期刊上分别 收集了 60 篇学术论文的引言部分建成了一个总字数为 67862 的专门语料库从 总体上说本文是定量讨论与定性讨论的相结合的研究列入统计的变量包括文章 的长度引言的长度引言占文章总长度的百分比语步模式语步长度主位使 用频率和主位推进几项研究的基本方法是统计这些变量在各引言中出现的频率总 数和其所百分比其他一些难以量化的变量比如语步的分析和使用频率最高的 词则以举例法和观察法为辅助进行讨论为了进一步说明两者的差距作者通过独 立样本检验验证了两组数据差异的显著性 研究结果表明中外英语期刊的语篇上既有差异也有相似性在字系特征方面 国外英语期刊论文和引言部分的总字数都是中国英语期刊论文和引言部分的总字数 的将近两倍而引言部分占论文的百分数没有显著差异这说明中外英语期刊上论 v 文的作者都比较重视引言部分在语步方面比较明显的差异出现在语步一和语步 三语步二没有显著差异中国英语期刊的引言部分中语步一中的文献综述部分 和语步三中的阐述研究目的出现得相对得比较少在主位选择方面标志主位非 标志主位和连接主位的数量方面没有显著性差别各类主位中使用频率最高的词 也有一定的异同主位推进方面延续型在中外英语期刊引言部分使用得比较多 而主位同一型在中国英语期刊出现得相对来说比较少 本文对中外英语期刊语篇上的异同进行了较为全面的描述研究发现对于学术 论文的作者进行写作和中国英语期刊的编辑们进行选稿时都具有参考意义 关键词对比研究 引言 语步 主位结构 ii abstract with the development of science and technology, more and more english academic periodicals are issued in china. these english periodicals play an important role in exhibiting to the world the latest theories and findings in china. nowadays, it is estimated that there are more than 186 ceps in china. among them, only 36 periodicals are listed by sci and ei, which means that chinese academic periodicals can not keep up with the international english periodicals. the most important reason is that chinese scholars english is not so good as english native speakers while writing an english research articles. as an opening part of english research articles, introduction section contains three moves. the move of establishing a territory provides centrality claiming, topic generation, and the review of literature. the second move is establishing a niche. the authors may counter-claim, indicate a gap, raise a question, or continue a tradition in this move. move 3 of occupying the niche may outline the purpose of the research, announce the present study, announce the main findings and indicate the structure of the paper. whether the author can provide an excellent introduction or not has great impact on whether the paper can be published in a high-quality periodical. linguists have done some research on it in the relevant aspects. however, so far not much contrastive studies on the discoursal level have been carried out from the aspects of functional grammar and discourse analysis. by using english-versioned introductions of chinese and international english periodicals, this research studies the similarity and the difference of the introductions of the two samples on the discoursal level from three aspects: graphological features, moves and thematic structures, aiming to find out how the introductions are different in chinese and international english periodicals. in the approach, english research articles from both chinese and international english periodicals are collected (around 610,000 words in total). the writer selects 60 introductions (around 67,826 words in total) from several chinese and international journals respectively. as a whole, this thesis is a combination of a quantitative study with iii a qualitative study. article length, introduction length, move model, move length, theme distribution, and thematic progression are the parameters to be under statistics. generally, in each introduction, the total number of a certain parameter is counted, with its proportion and average being calculated. in order to further dig into the similarity and the difference between these two samples, the independent t-test is used to verify whether the statistical difference is significant enough to distinguish chinese data and international data from each other. through the three-dimensioned discussion, we conclude that differences exist in the article length, introduction length, length of move 1 and move 3, frequency of unmarked theme, marked theme and conjunctive theme and thematic progression. possible reasons are provided here to explain the similarity and the difference existing in these aspects. this thesis provides a comprehensive description of the discoursal difference of the introductions in chinese and international english periodicals. the research findings are good reference for chinese authors to write research articles in english better to obey the underlying writing rules in order to publish their articles in international authoritative periodicals, for chinese editors of chinese english periodicals to examine the articles they receive more closely and carefully to improve the chinese english periodicals. key words: contrastive study introduction move thematic progression 独创性声明 本人声明所呈交的学位论文是我个人在导师指导下进行的研究工作及取得的研 究成果尽我所知除文中已经标明引用的内容外本论文不包含任何其他个人或 集体已经发表或撰写过的研究成果对本文的研究做出贡献的个人和集体均已在 文中以明确方式标明本人完全意识到本声明的法律结果由本人承担 学位论文作者签名胡蓉 日期2005 年 4 月 30 日 学位论文版权使用授权书 本学位论文作者完全了解学校有关保留使用学位论文的规定即学校有权 保留并向国家有关部门或机构送交论文的复印件和电子版允许论文被查阅和借阅 本人授权华中科技大学可以将本学位论文的全部或部分内容编入有关数据库进行检 索可以采用影印缩印或扫描等复制手段保存和汇编本学位论文 保密 在_年解密后适用本授权书 不保密 请在以上方框内打 学位论文作者签名 胡蓉 指导教师签名胡志清 日期2005 年 4 月 30 日 日期2005 年 4 月 30 日 本论文属于 1 introduction with the development of science and technology, more and more chinese english periodicals (hereafter abbreviated as ceps) are issued in china. these english periodicals play an important role in exhibiting to the world the latest theories and findings in china. nowadays, it is estimated that there are more than 186 ceps in china. among them, only 36 periodicals are listed by sci and ei, which means that chinese academic periodicals can not keep up with the international english periodicals (hereafter abbreviated as ieps). bi (2002) explored four reasons, among which the most important one is that chinese scholars english is not so good as english native speakers. it is valuable to investigate on research articles (hereafter abbreviated as ra). in recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in the research articles. a number of studies have been concerned with structure, social construction and historical evolution of various parts of research articles. swales (1981,1990), swales and najjar (1987) paid their attention to the introduction sections, brett (1994), thompson (1993) to the results sections, hopkins and dudley-evans (1988) to the discussion sections. even the abstracts were studied by salager-meyer (1990, 1992), melander, swales and fredrickson in 1998. also, lots of researchers have studied various lexico-grammatical features of the research article, such as tense choice (lackstrom et al., 1972, 1973; ard, 1982; heslot, 1982; malcolm, 1987; oster, 1981), voice (tarone et al., 1981; tomlin, 1981;), citation patterns (jacoby, 1987). one aspect of the ra that has been most studied is the introduction. swales (1981, 1990) has summarized the move structure of ra introductions, i.e., cars model. crookes (1986) has pointed to the cyclical nature of introductions. jacoby (1987) has investigated the use of references in introductions. gupta (1995) has explored the way of managing general and specific information in introduction. bhatia (1997) has summarized the mixing genre in academic introductions. samaraj (2002) has analyzed the variations across disciplines in introductions. researchers have also used swales model to examine 2 ra written in different languages (such as malay, arabic, chinese and swedish). there has also been some contrastive study. taylor and chen (1991) applied swales model to the contrastive study of science paper introductions written by chinese and anglo-american scientist. a similar study was carried out by burgess (1997) who examined the published output of spanish-speaking linguists and compared the discourse structure of introductions to those written in english for international publication. both of these studies have only focused on the contrastive study of move, not from the discourse. we use introductions from ieps and ceps as our research objects, and try to find out answers to the following research questions: 1) are there any differences between the graphological features between introductions in ras in ieps and ceps? 2) are there any differences between the moves in ras by english and chinese scholars? 3) are there any differences between the discoursal structure in terms of types of theme and rheme and thematic progression in english papers in english and chinese journals? if yes, how are they different? and possibly why? if possible, we also want to examine the relationship between moves and thematic progression. with the purpose of finding out the differences between introduction sections in ceps and ieps, we report on a contrastive analysis of english introductions in cep and iep on the discoursal level. for the systematic research, the writer selects 120 introductions from 8 ceps and ieps, 15 from each periodical. all the periodicals are from 4 scientific fields. one hundred and twenty introduction sections of ras are chosen randomly to establish a corpus. comparing research article introductions from the discoursal aspect of moves and thematic structure helps us to explore the similarity and the difference between introduction sections in ceps and ieps. graphological difference is the first thing we examined. it is assumed to find out 3 differences between total word count, between introduction length and between the percentage of the introduction occupying the whole passage of introduction sections in cep and iep. the reason is also explored in this paper. graphological difference is just one aspect of discourse analysis. another one is difference on moves and steps. all the introductions moves and steps are identified in this thesis. we also figure out a table about the number of moves and steps in introductions in ceps and ieps to present the difference between them. move length is another examination objective. an independent t-test is used here to see if there is a significant difference. thematic structure is the last thing we investigate in this research. we select at random 64 introductions, 8 respectively from each periodical. we try to identify theme of each sentence and group them to find out the most usual themes in iep and cep respectively. possible reasons are provided for the similarity and the difference between introduction sections in the discussion section. thematic progression will be analyzed in 20 introductions, 10 respectively from ceps and ieps, which include all the three moves. possible reasons are provided for the similarity and the difference between introduction sections in the discussion section. there are two main contributions of this paper. one is that guided by functional grammar, the differences between introductions in iep and cep are explored by means of quantitative analysis. the other one is that the results of this study can have implications for the teaching of academic writing to chinese writers and the improvement of ceps. the content of the thesis is made up of four parts. after introduction of the academic writing, a situation of ceps and the research significance, theoretical bases and previous study are reviewed. then data collection and process of data analysis are introduced. subsequently, with report of the statistical results, differences between introductions in ceps and ieps are explored from three dimensions of graphological features, move and thematic structure dimensions with the aid of independent samples t-test. finally, conclusion and limitation of the research are presented. 4 1 literature review 1.1 theoretical base 1.1.1 genre analysis in the field of applied discourse analysis, most discussions of genre have drawn on the definitions given by swales (1990) or martin (1984), thus forming two trends in genre analysis: the american tradition represented by john swales and the australian school represented by jim martin. the american school thinks that “each genre is an instance of successful achievement of specific communicative purpose using conventionalized knowledge of linguistic and discoursal resources.” (bhatia, 1993:3) such a definition of genre is frequently quoted and accepted by researchers of esp, who are interested in genre as a tool for analyzing and teaching the spoken and written language required of non-native speakers in academic and professional settings (bhatia, 1993:14; flowerdew, 1993:20; hopkins swales, 1990:21 ; thompson, 1994:30). scholars in this field have framed genres as oral and written text types defined by their formal properties as well as by their communicative purposes within social contexts. australian school points out that genre is a type of discourse and that the generic structure of a text defines a genre, so that texts of the same genre will realize the same obligatory elements of structure (hasan, 1978:79). martin (1987) has defined genres as staged, goal-oriented social processes, structural forms that cultures use in certain contexts to achieve various purposes. australian genre scholars have tended to focus on genre analysis related to primary and secondary school education and nonprofessional texts rather than on university and professional writing activities. their schemes have focused on both global text structure and sentence-level register features, associated with field, tenor, and mode. 5 in a broad sense, genre analysis refers to the study of how language is used within a particular socio-cultural setting by a discourse community for a particular purpose or performing a particular function (qin, 1997: 14). currently, most of the research in genre analysis has concentrated on english for specific and academic purposes. 1.1.2 functionalist theories on theme and rheme it is mathesius, the father of prague school who first proposed the concept of theme and rheme. he conceived of the sentence from the point of view of the information it conveyed and he argued that it consists of two basic parts. the first part is the theme, which is something already known from the preceding context or as information taken for granted, and which does not contribute anything new to the information to be transmitted. the second part is the rheme, which contains all the new information to be transmitted and substantially enriches the hearers knowledge. further research was carried out by halliday. he accepted these two terms, but had different ideas on the classification of themes. halliday (1985) defines theme as “the point of departure of the message”, where he is thinking of the message carried by one clause. in simple terms then, a clause begins with a realization of the theme. this is followed by the realization of the rheme, which can be explained as being the rest of the message. that is, the theme tells the listener or reader what the clause is about, while the rheme is the details of the theme. halliday (1985) divides the theme into three groups. one is simple theme, and an other one is multiple theme. simple theme refers to the theme that can not be divided into smaller functional units. nominal groups, adjective, prepositional groups can act as a simple theme. all simple theme is topical theme. multiple theme has its own internal structure. multiple theme can be further classified into textual theme, interpersonal theme and topical theme. thus, we can analyze the constituent of theme in complicated sentence. topical theme is not the only element but the essential one. 6 it may occur with textual theme or interpersonal theme. when these three kinds of theme appear simultaneously, textual theme comes first, following interpersonal theme and topical theme. every sentence has its own thematic structure. when there is only one sentence, its theme and rheme is not changeable. without its context, the theme and rheme of the lonely sentence is isolated without any development. however, most of discourses are constructed with two or more than two sentences. the contextual themes, rhemes and theme and rheme have some relationship. this kind of relationship can be called progression. halliday (1985) defines three patterns of thematic progression. the first one is the constant theme pattern, where a common theme is shared by each clause. the second type is the linear theme pattern. in this type, the rheme of one clause is taken up as the theme of the subsequent clause. the last common type of thematic progression is known as the split rheme pattern. this pattern occurs when the rheme of a clause has two components, each of which is taken in turn as the theme of a subsequent clause. chinese scholars also put their interests in thematic progression. huang (1985) summarized seven thematic progression patterns, that is, parallel pattern, constant, concentrative, linear, derived patterns and saltatorial patterns. xu shenghuan (1982) has explored seven types of relationship between theme and rheme: the relationship of whole and part, collection and element or element and element, generalization and particularity, entailment, opposite, cooccurrence and intersection. 1.1.3 contrastive rhetoric contrastive linguistics is defined as a subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the comparison of two or more languages or subsystems of languages in order to determine both the differences and similarities between them. contrastive rhetoric examines differences and similarities in writing across cultures. rhetoric is defined as the “choice of linguistic