Abstract
As a signpost for the reader, the abstract contains the main body of a thesis and summarizes the most important information in an article. Thus, it is essential for assessing the quality and value of a thesis. This research aims to provide insight into the linguistic features of English abstract writing. Based on the multi-dimensional analysis approach proposed by Biber (1988), this study investigates the difference in English abstracts between the Chinese master’s theses (CMT) and the international core journal article (ICJA). With the help of the MAT (Multi-dimensional Analysis Tagger 1.3) analysis tool, the corpus of 100 English abstracts from these 2 resources has been analyzed for comparison of the functional and lexical-grammatical features in 6 dimensions. The results show that there are differences between CMT and ICJA’s English abstracts in dimension 4 (Overt Expression of Persuasion) and dimension 6 (On-line Informational Elaboration), and 25 linguistic features across these 6 dimensions. The results help learners identify the differences in dimensions and linguistic features between their English abstracts and those written by experts to improve their abstract writing and to write more native-like theses.
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