A Comparative Study on Meta-discourse in English Abstracts of Chinese and American Environmental Journal Articles

International College,College of English,Dalian University,Dalian,China Email:206096612@qq.com

[Abstract]Meta-discourse is a discourse strategy which helps the writer construct coherent discourse,express their attitudes,and achieve interaction with readers.Recently,meta-discourse has become a research hotspot in academic discourse.This paper makes a comparative analysis of meta-discourse use in English abstracts of Chinese and American environmental journals and focuses on reasons for usage discrepancy by adopting quantitative and qualitative research methods,aiming to provide some implications for Chinese environmental researchers in English abstract writing.

[Keywords]meta-discourse;comparative analysis;English abstracts;environmental journals;usage discrepancy

Introduction

As a genre with unique function,abstract not only highly summarizes the content of a journal article,but also undertakes the author’s communicative purpose and is taken as the spokesman of an article(Liu,2013).As Swale claims(2001,179),“of those who will read the tittle,only some will read the abstract,and of those who read the abstract,only some will read the article itself”.Thus,abstract is an essential part of academic articles.Meta-discourse is an essential means of organizing discourse,expressing the author’s views,and involving readers’responses(Xu,2006).The proper use of meta-discourse can help the author construct coherent abstracts,facilitate readers’interpretation of research articles,and further persuade readers to recognize its academic value.

Nowadays,English abstract is of increasing importance for the author to promote scientific research achievements and win international academic reputation(Guo&Ma,2016).Lots of domestic scholars have made contrastive studies on English abstracts written by native English and Chinese researchers in different disciplines.However,these are more in soft disciplines,but less in hard disciplines.There is even no such study in the field of environment.Recently,with the aggravation of global warming,more attention has been paid to environmental problems.Environmental academic articles exert a great influence on the promotion of the latest research achievements and the improvement of global environmental issues.

Given this,this paper makes a comparison of meta-discourse in English abstracts by Chinese and American environmental researchers and emphatically discusses reasons for usage discrepancy so as to help Chinese environmental researchers improve the equality of English abstracts.They further define meta-discourse as resources used to guide readers through the text and help them grasp the internal arguments.

Theoretical Framework

Definition of Meta-discourse

Zellig Harris(1959)firstly proposes“Meta-discourse”which refers to the effort the author(or speaker)makes to guide readers(or listeners)toward the interpretation of their texts or words.After that,lots of linguists have discussed the definition of meta-discourse.Williams(1981)notes that meta-discourse is“the writing about writing,whatever does not refer to the subject matter being addressed”.Vande Kopple(1985)takes meta-discourse as discourse that people use not to“add referential materials,but to help our readers organize,classify,interpret,evaluate and react to such materials”.The above definitions regarding meta-discourse as“none-propositional”elements of texts have been contended by subsequent researchers.According to Flower(1987),meta-discourse is not distinct from discourse,instead,meta-discourse elements interact with propositional elements within the text:the former is related to world and the latter to the text and its reception.Hyland and Tse(2004)also point out that meta-discourse is not separable from propositional content in the text but is an indispensable means of organizing the propositional content,supporting the author’s position and establishing the relationship with potential readers.

Classification of Meta-discourse

Many scholars have made classifications of meta-discourse,most of which are conducted from the perspective of Halliday’s meta-functions of language.Williams(1983)identifies three types of meta-discourse:advance organizers,connectives,and interpersonal discourse.Vande Kopple(1985)classifies meta-discourse into textual meta-discourse and interpersonal meta-discourse including seven subcategories.Following Vande Kopple,Hyland(1998)identifies ten types of meta-discourse under textual meta-discourse and interpersonal meta-discourse.However,Hyland and Tse(2004)consider the division of textual and interpersonal meta-discourse breaks the integrity of three meta-functions of Halliday,so they reclassify meta-discourse into interactive meta-discourse and interactional meta-discourse.Interactive meta-discourse refers to devices that help the author construct coherent texts so as to guide readers through the whole text,which includes transitions,frame markers,endophoric markers,evidentials,and code glosses.Interactional meta-discourse is concerned with devices that the author uses to express their attitudes and stances,so as to attract readers’engagement into the discourse,which hedges,boosters,attitude markers,engagement markers,and self-mentions.The detailed information is shown in the following Table 1.

Table 1:Hyland and Tse’s Classification of Meta-discourse

Evidentials Code glosses Interactional resources Hedges Boosters Attitude markers Engagement markers Self-mentions Refer to the information in other texts Help readers understand ideational meaning Involve the reader in the argument Withhold writer’s full commitment to arguments Emphasize writer’s certainty to arguments Show writer’s attitudes to arguments Explicitly establish writer-reader relationship Demonstrate the presence of writer according to X/(Y,1990)/Z state namely/e.g./such as/in other words might/perhaps/possible/about in fact/definitely/it is clear that unfortunately/I agree/surprisingly consider/note that/you can see that I/we/my/our

Research Design

Source of Data and Research Questions

In this paper,20 English abstracts are respectively selected from top one environmental journal with the highest impact factor in China and America,in which the Chinese journal is Environmental Science and the American journal isEnvironmental Science and Technology.Considering different length of English abstracts in Chinese and American environmental journals articles,the author chooses 9 English abstracts of Chinese journal articles(hereafter referred as EC)with a total of 2879 words and 11 English abstracts of American environmental journal articles(hereafter referred as EA)with a total of 2873 words.To guarantee timeliness,all English abstracts are from journal articles published between 2016 and 2018.

This paper aims to deal with the following three issues:

(1)What is the overall distribution of meta-discourse in corpus EC and corpus EA?

(2)Are there any differences in meta-discourse use by Chinese and American researchers?

(3)What are reasons for these differences in meta-discourse use between two groups?

Research Methods and Process

This paper adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis methods.Firstly,with reference to Hyland and Tse’s classification of meta-discourse,the author manually annotates meta-discourse resources in corpus EA and EC.To ensure the validity of results,the author reads all English abstracts word by word and identifies metadiscourse resources within specific contexts.Secondly,the frequency and proposition of meta-discourse devices are calculated.And Chi-square calculator is used to test if there is a significant difference in different categories of metadiscourse between two corpora.At last,the author makes a detailed analysis of meta-discourse in two corpora and emphatically discusses reasons for differences in meta-discourse use.

Result and Discussion

Overall Description of Meta-discourse in EC and EA

Table 2:Distribution of Meta-discourse in EC and EA

From Table 2,we can find that the total occurrences of meta-discourse in EA are 180,which outnumber that in EC with 113 occurrences.This suggests that American researchers adopt meta-discourse devices more consciously to make abstracts coherent,and understandable.Further observation of two general categories of meta-discourse shows that the proportion of interactional meta-discourse is larger than that of interactive meta-discourse both in EA(3.5%vs 2.9%)and EC(2.1%vs 1.8%),and the discrepancy is relative bigger in EA,which reflects that both American and Chinese researchers are aware of the communicative purpose of abstracts.With the employment of interactional metadiscourse,they seek to construct interaction with readers,persuading them to recognize the academic value of research articles and then read with interest.

Table 3:Chi-square Test of Meta-discourse between EC and EA

To find if there is a significant difference in meta-discourse use between EC and EA,chi-square test is performed.As the result of Chi-square test presents in Table 3,x2=15.321>3.84(when df=1,p=0.05,the critical value is 3.84),which proves that there exists a significant difference between American and Chinese researchers in the use of meta-discourse.

Table 4:Chi-square Test of Interactive Meta-discourse between EC and EA

As Table 4 shows,Chi-square Test conducted on interactive meta-discourse between EC and EA reveals a significant difference,x2=6.23 ＞3.84.With regard to its five sub-categories,there is a significant difference on frame markers(x2=4＞3.84)and code glosses(x2=10.526＞3.84)between two corpora.Here is the detailed analysis of these three devices used in two corpora.

-Frame markers are concerned with text boundaries or elements of schematic text structure,including:sequencers(firstly,next),stage labels(at this point,in conclusion),goal announcers(aim to,intend to)and topicalisers(move on,turn to).There are only 4 occurrences of frame markers in EC and goal announcers are most used items.However,the total number of this device is 12 in EA,far more than that in EC.Five types of this device are all involved in this corpus and goal announcers and stage labels are two most used items.The following two examples reflect the use of frame markers.In example(a)and(b),“to”and“aims at”are used to make readers clear of the research purpose.“In conclusion”in example(c)is used to label the stage of the unfolding abstract.

(a)Tomeet the requirements of regional air quality management(AQM)...(EC)

(b)This studyaims atquantifying their various potential environmental impacts.(EA)

(c)In conclusion,the impinger described here has many advantages...(EA)

Frame markers are significantly more frequently used in EA than in EC,which can be attributed to different intrinsic structural features for English and Chinese.As hypotactic language(Xu,2006),English resorts to various cohesive devices to achieve logical connections between sentences,while Chinese,defined as paratactic language(Xu,2006),tends to actualize the logical connection through semantic meaning of sentences.As frame markers are common devices used to organize the internal structure of discourse,American researchers make extensive use of them in abstract writing.

-Code glosses are devices used to provide additional information in the way of exampling,explaining or rephrasing some special concepts which can be divided into exemplifiers(for example,such as)and reformulators(namely,interpreted as).According to Hyland(2005),punctuation devices,particularly dashes and parentheses,are also essential code glosses.There are only 9 cases of code glosses in EC and such as and()are two most used items.However,in EA,the frequency of code glosses is remarkably higher(29 occurrences)and reformulators especially()are most frequently used.The following are examples of code glosses.In example(a),“such as”is used to explain the item“crustal ions”which may be unfamiliar to readers by giving specific examples.In example(b),the writer employs parentheses to add detailed information to statements so that readers can comprehend them really well.

(a)The growth of crustal ions,such asCa2+and K+,was notably the largest and NH4+were minimal.(EC)

(b)Among 81 samples tested,77(95%)showed low recoveries(<10%)of spiked murine norovirus.(EA)

The significant variation in the use of code glosses can be explained from writer-responsible style in English and reader-responsible style in Chinese(Hinds,1987).Writer-responsible style requires writers to make clear the propositional meanings to facilitate readers’comprehension of discourse.While readers-responsible style places the responsibility on readers to recover the meaning which is implicitly presented in discourse.Code glosses are devices used to clarify some concepts or terms which may be hard to understand for readers with the writer’s anticipation.This is why code glosses are widely used in abstracts written by American researchers.

Comparison of Interactional Meta-discourse in EC and EA

Sub-category Hedges Boosters EC 26 19 EA 33 16 Chi-square Value(x2)0.831 0.257

Table 5:Chi-square Test of Interactional Meta-discourse between EC and EA

The result of Chi-square test on interactional meta-discourse between EC and EA as is shown in Table 5 indicates that there is a significant difference(x2=8.61＞3.84).To be specific,there is a significant difference on attitude markers(x2=7.681＞3.84)and self-mentions(x2=15＞3.84)between two corpora.

-Attitude markers mainly refer to attitude verbs(agree,prefer),adverbs(appropriately,hopefully)and adjectives(amazed,important),expressing the writer’s emotional attitudes to propositions.There are only 14 occurrences of attitude markers in EC and adjectives are most used items.However,in EA,there are 33 cases of attitude markers,among which three types are all involved and adjectives and adverbs take a larger part.Here are two examples of attitude markers.Attitude marks like“important”and“vital”in example(a)and(b)are frequently observed in two corpora,which are used by writers to explicitly display their attitudes.

(a)However,this result indicated that the wind speed was animportantinfluencing factor for the variations of precipitation δ18O.(EC)

(b)Black carbon(BC)emissions from gas flaring in the oil and gas industry are postulated to have critical impacts onclimateand public health.(EA)

The remarkable difference in the use of attitude markers between two corpora may be caused by different requirements for abstracts in Chinese and American journals.In abstracts of Chinese journal articles,especially in hard disciplines,researchers are required to focus on the objective presentation of research purposes,methods,and results without excessive emotional and evaluative words(Ruan,2014).However,in abstracts of American journal articles,researchers are encouraged to express their attitudes and evaluations so as to persuade readers to recognize the academic value of researches.Thus,compared with Chinese researchers,American researchers are more inclined to adopt various attitude markers in abstracts.

-Self-mentions are devices used to present explicit writer presence in discourse,usually including first-person pronouns(I,exclusive we)and possessive adjectives(my,our).One surprising finding is that none of self-mentions occurs in EC,while there are 15 occurrences of this device in EA.Within all types of self-mentions in EA,exclusive“We”is most frequently used,followed by“our study”and“our Data”.The use of self-mentions is manifested in following two examples.“We”in example(a)is used to explicitly present the writer’s subjective status in the research.The adoption of“our”in example(b)shows the writer’s confidence in research findings.

(a)Using the most sensitive assay combination,wemeasured TCS concentrations in water samples...(EA)

(b)Ourfindings are relevant to efforts to engineer environmental ecosystems...(EA)

English emphasizes individualism and encourages individuals to express their own attitudes and viewpoints,while Chinese emphasizes collectivism and advocates collective actions but not individuals(Pan,1997).It offers support for the big discrepancy in self-mentions use by American and Chinese researchers.American researchers prefer to adopting self-mentions in abstracts to show their explicit presence and highlight their contributions to the research.In contrast,Chinese researchers have a tendency to conceal their identities in abstracts in case of the subjectivity of statements,thus they rarely use self-mentions especially first-person pronouns as“we”.

Conclusion

This paper makes a comparison of meta-discourse use in English abstracts by Chinese and American environmental researchers and focuses on usage discrepancy.Significant differences are found in frame markers,code glosses,attitude markers and self-mentions.Language features,requirements by journal and culture factors are considered to be main reasons for these differences.

Hopefully,the research findings can provide some enlightenments for Chinese researchers in hard disciplines in English abstract writing.However,research data in this paper are not enough so that its representativeness may be affected.Future studies are expected to expand data and make a more in-depth study on meta-discourse in Chinese and American environmental research articles.