中外学者英语学术论文摘要修辞劝说机制比较研究

A Comparative Study of Rhetorical Persuasion of English Research Article Abstracts by Chinese and English Writers

由于承担着介绍研究、吸引读者等多重功能,论文摘要成为劝说资源分布密集的语篇类型,有其特有的修辞劝说机制。通过比较中外学者在应用语言学领域国际英文期刊所发表论文摘要中的修辞劝说机制规律,本研究发现,中外学者的论文摘要修辞劝说机制通过语篇结构和词汇语法两种途径实现,所形成的修辞劝说机制表现出的共性大于差异性,其可能的原因包括论文摘要文体共性要求以及学术国际化趋势。

Since it plays an important role in introducing a study and attracting its potential readers’ attention,the abstract of an article becomes a type of genre that is rich in persuasive resources and has its unique mechanism of rhetorical persuasion. In this paper,which analyzes the English research article abstracts by Chinese and English writers in the field of applied linguistics,the features of move structure and metadiscourse are taken as persuasive measures which are studied from the perspective of Aristotle’s classical rhetorical theory,and comparisons are made between the two groups of writers based on the two corpora of research article abstracts constructed by the author. The result of the study shows a strong tendency of similarity and much less difference between the two groups of writers in the mechanism of rhetorical persuasion which are both formed by textual structure and lexical-grammatical choices and both employ more appeal in logos and ethos and less in pathos. The possible chief reasons for the similarity may be the common requirement of the style of abstract and the wish of Chinese writers to make their researches accepted by international academic community.