A STUDY ON SUBJECT ANIMACY IN ENGLISH ABSTRACTS OF MA THESES BY CHINESE AND OCCIDENTAL WRITERS
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Authors: Yan Yin, Hongyan Yan
Keywords: occidental writer, MA theses, English abstract, subject animacy
Abstract: Structured abstract provides guidance for both format and content, and is an important innovation. It is essential to write proper abstract in committing a research and composing academic papers. Scholars from overseas and domestic do researches on abstract from different perspectives in recent years, some study the discourse characters from the point view of discourse analysis. Some do their studies from the aspect of stylistic. In addition to those mentioned above, with the development of science and technology, and the increasing dominance of copra, more and more scholars explore the features with copra. More importantly, the cross-discipline researches dominate the study mainstream. By importing different theories from other disciplines, researches become more and more significant.
This study, following the mainstream of research, explores the connections between subject animacy and learners language competence. Taking the advantage of current copra, this study collects texts of English abstracts written by Chinese and occidental MA graduates from PQDT and CDMD to explore the connection between subject animacy and language learners language competence.
By comparing the frequency of subject animacy in English abstracts created by Chinese English learners and occidental native-English speaker, the paper finds that English abstract both written by native-English speakers and non-English speakers have low animacy in their subjects. This result may presents the feature of academic writing, namely objectivity. The frequency of first person pronouns that the native-English speakers used in different disciplines are almost the same, while among the English learners, English majors and non-English majors used the first person pronouns different in frequency.
By analyzing the frequency of using of the inanimate-subject sentences, the study finds that Chinese English learners use more inanimate subject sentences in their writing of English abstracts in general. Moreover, the frequencies of inanimate subject sentences constructed by both English majors and non-English majors in China are almost the same.