玲玲 江 (NORTHWESTERN POLYTECHNICAL UNIVERSITY)

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THEMATIC PROGRESSION PATTERNS IN MEDICAL AND LINGUISTIC ACADEMIC ABSTRACTS : LINGUISTICS, DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, AND RELATED AREAS

As a complete text and first impression of an article, abstract plays a crucial role by succinctly summarizing the main content of the article, so the discourse cohesion is essential. According to Danes, Thematic Progression Pattern (TPP) is a valuable tool for discourse cohesion. While extensive researches on cohesion in abstracts from the perspective of genre and different language have attracted the attention of scholars, there is a lack of comparative analysis between different disciplines. This study aims to investigate the distribution features of TPPs and explore whether there are similarities and differences between soft and hard disciplines. 60 English abstracts from medical and linguistic journals were selected to build corpora. The findings reveal that the abstracts of both disciplines exhibit the similar patterns such as simple linear progression, the same theme, derived theme, and split rheme. However, there are significant differences in the frequency of each type due to the disciplinary differences in thinking patterns, research methods, and content requirements in abstract. Understanding these differences between disciplines can help writers improve their language cohesion in abstract, increasing the likelihood of publication, because a well constructed abstract can benefit editors and readers access the key information more easily, enhancing the efficiency of manuscript reviewing and reading processes.

Lingling Jiang, first year graduate student at School of Foreign Studies, Northwestern Polytechnical University, major in Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, with research interests in Systemic Functional Linguistics and Academic Discourse Analysis.