Chinese Research Articles Research Articles

Certainty Stance Adverbs in Chinese Linguistic Academic Writing: A Corpus-based Study

This study delves into the intricate usage of certainty stance adverbs in the academic writings of the Chinese. The object of this study is to conduct a contrastive analysis of certainty stance adverbs between Chinese linguistic MA novices and linguistic experts. The subject of this study is to explore the similarities and differences in the use of these adverbs within the academic discourse of the two groups mentioned. In addressing these disparities, the study seeks to analyze them from the perspective of interlanguage and interpersonal function, with the ultimate goal of enhancing the production of high-quality academic papers by the Chinese. The study employs two key methods: the contrastive analysis method and the corpus-based method. The novelty of the study lies in its contrastive examination of certainty stance adverbs between Chinese linguistic MA novices and experts. Through an in-depth analysis of theoretical frameworks and linguistic data extracted from the MA theses of Chinese linguistic novices and research articles of linguistic experts, the study underscores the importance of considering the similarities and differences in the use of certainty stance adverbs within the realm of second language acquisition and pragmatic studies. This consideration aims to refine learners’ syntactical and pragmatic command of certainty stance adverbs to align with expert academic discourse, ultimately fostering effective interpersonal communication in academic writing. The findings of this research offer valuable insights into the specific linguistic challenges encountered by the Chinese, thereby laying a solid groundwork for the development of targeted pedagogical strategies to bolster their academic writing skills.

Author self-reference: A cross-linguistic/cultural and cross-disciplinary analysis

This study explored the use of author self-reference from cross-linguistic/cultural and cross-disciplinary perspectives in research articles (RAs). Based on a self-built corpus consisting of two disciplines (Computer Science and Linguistics) and two languages (Chinese and English), this study extracted the self-reference markers and compared their uses across the linguistic/cultural and disciplinary corpora. The cross-linguistic/cultural analysis showed that English RAs contain a higher frequency of first-person pronouns, while Chinese RAs tend to utilize more inanimate NPs in both disciplines. The cross-disciplinary comparison identified that English Computer Science texts are characterized by a more explicit authorial persona, while Chinese RAs display a mitigated authorial presence in the text construction. The findings contribute to our knowledge of how the specific disciplinary community and cultural conventions influence writers’ manifestation of their authorial presence.

Promotional strategies in English and Chinese research article introduction and discussion/conclusion sections: A cross-cultural study

This study explores promotional strategies in English and Chinese introductions and discussion/conclusion sections of applied linguistics (AL) research articles (RAs). Based on genre analysis, a more comprehensive and fine-grained taxonomy of promotional strategies was developed for the two RA part-genres that show a symmetrical relationship in terms of their promotional moves. A higher degree of promotion is detected in our corpus, which may be due to the increasing marketization of academia and the nature of AL. Regarding the cross-cultural variations, it is found that English texts are more promotional than Chinese ones. In the introduction, Chinese writers tend to rely heavily on the top three most frequent promotional strategies in our corpus, while English writers are inclined to justify and reinforce the significance of the research topic or claims, demonstrating a strong argumentation pattern. In the discussion/conclusion section, Chinese writers are more likely to summarize and explain their research results whereas English writers show a preference for evaluation of their research findings. Competitive research/publication contexts, national culture, audience, and disciplinary writing conventions might contribute to such differences. The findings and discussion through the lens of interdiscursivity and intercultural rhetoric have implications for EAL/ESL academic writing research and pedagogy.

Mapping knowledge landscapes and emerging trends of non-contact vital signs monitoring: A bibliometric and visualization analysis from 2002 to 2023

This study makes a comparative analysis based on knowledge mapping of Chinese and English publications on non-contact vital signs monitoring and provides a reference for future research and development. Publications were retrieved from Web of Science (WoS) and PubMed, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), and Wanfang databases from January 1, 2002 to October 31, 2023. Bibliometric analysis was performed using CiteSpace software. Information from 612 English and 543 Chinese original research articles was collected and analyzed. The maximum number of English appeared in 2022 and the maximum number of Chinese articles appeared in 2020, and the number of articles published afterward declined slightly. For the articles published in English, USA and China shared the highest number of publications. Chinese Academy of Sciences was the most published institution. Steffen Leonhardt was the highest-published author. Meanwhile, within the Chinese articles, the most productive province was Beijing. The most productive institution was the Air Force Medical University. The most productive author was Weixue Liu. The research institutions and authors of English and Chinese articles were decentralized. The hotspots of the English articles mainly were “heart rate” and “respiratory rate”, and the Chinese articles focused on “temperature” and “heart rate”. Concluding, the research on non-contact vital signs monitoring is in a booming phase of development at present. Non-contact heart rate monitoring is a popular research direction in English and Chinese research. In the future, research institutions and authors should strengthen their cooperation and communication to promote the development of this research area.

Translatorial voice through modal stance: A corpus-based study of modality shifts in Chinese-to-English translation of research article abstracts

Research on translation shifts, especially divergence in modality, that occur to English translations of Chinese research article abstracts is rare. The article aims to explore the linguistic changes in modality use, a linguistic device for expressing authors’ evaluative judgement, in the abstracts of Chinese research articles and their English translations. By adopting a three-step analytical coding procedure from Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study analyses the cross-linguistic modality shifts in modal value, type and orientation in English translations of Chinese research article abstracts (RAAs) from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. It is found that 1) quantitatively, a considerable number of modality shifts have been observed in translated RAAs on value, followed by type and orientation, in which the distributions present a stronger and more objectivised stance resulting from a loss of modality on low-value implicit proposition; 2) qualitatively, Chinese-specific lexical, syntactic, and textual factors are associated with modality shifts, including lexical ambiguity, “run-on” sentences, and implicit information structure. The findings provide evidence of how original authorial modal stance is influenced by translators and integrated into academic discourse. The study also paves the way for future investigations of possible variables (e.g., the speech-written mode) in modality shifts.

"We may conclude that:" a corpus-based study of stance-taking in conclusion sections of RAs across cultures and disciplines.

Research article conclusions form an important sub-genre in the academic community. This study aims to compare the use of stance markers in English and Chinese research article conclusions and investigate how stance markers may vary in soft and hard sciences. Based on Hyland's stance model, an analysis of stance markers over 20 years was made in two corpora, which were compiled with 180 research article conclusions in each language from four disciplines. It was found that English writers and soft science writers tended to make statements more tentatively by hedges and craft their persona more explicitly through self-mentions. However, Chinese writers and hard science writers made their claims with more certainty by boosters and showed their affective attitude more frequently through attitude markers. The results reveal how writers from different cultural backgrounds construct their stances and also unveil the disciplinary differences involved in stance-taking. It is hoped that this corpus study will inspire future research on stance-taking in the conclusion section and also help cultivate writers' genre awareness.

A Diachronic Study of Interaction in Chinese Academic Writing Through the Lens of Metadiscourse

Metadiscourse provides a framework for understanding interaction in discourse by examining the linguistic resources that the writers employ to organize their text and involve their readers. The studies in metadiscourse use in Chinese academic writing reveal that Chinese scholars maintain an impersonal style and adopt an authoritative stance. We investigated the changes in interaction in Chinese academic writing during the past 40 years by exploring metadiscourse use in 90 Chinese research articles from the top five Chinese academic journals in Applied Linguistics in 1980, 2000, and 2020. The analysis shows significant decreases in metadiscourse use during this period in both interactive and interactional features, and changes in linguistic choices of metadiscourse demonstrate a shift to guidance and persuasion with more logical arguments, objective evidence, and relevant literature, possibly suggesting that Chinese scholars now use metadiscourse mainly to clarify and inform, presenting knowledge as codified facts, privileged rather than negotiated or constructed. We also find that metadiscourse use significantly increased in 2000 before its decrease in 2020, unveiling Chinese scholars’ earlier efforts to guide and involve.

A Comparative Study of Move Analysis in Chinese and International Research Article Abstracts

To raise the authors’ awareness of using the moves and move models in abstract writing, this study compares the frequency, type, and significant difference of moves and move models in 100 abstracts written in English by Chinese scholars and 100 abstracts written by international scholars in 10 prestigious international journals in the field of linguistics. The adapted Hyland’s five-move model was used as research framework, Corpus and statistic software SPSS were used as research instruments. The comparisons report that Chinese scholars tend to use introduction, result, and conclusion moves. International scholars are inclined to use purpose, method, result, and conclusion moves. The results also indicate that the four-move model is the most prevalent in the two groups. Chinese scholars used the two-move model more than the English authors whereas used the five-move model less than the international authors. The findings are intended to provide referential value for the writing and teaching of English for academic purposes.

한⋅중 학술 논문에 나타난 ‘필자지칭표현’의 사용 양상 연구 - 언어학 분야의 학술 논문을 대상으로 -

Based on a self-built corpus, this study explores the construction of self-mentions in Korean and Chinese research articles. Finding shows that in Korean articles, non-personal terms were used far more than first personal plural pronoun, while in Chinese articles, two expressions of self-mentions were evenly used. Korean scholars mainly use "우리”to narrow the distance from readers, and Chinese scholars mainly reveal their status as experts through "我们". But they all tend to increase the objectivity of research by separating themselves from texts through non-personal terms. (Zhejiang Normal UniversityㆍKyungpook National University)

The Contrastive Rhetoric: The Distinction in the Use of the Metatext, Preview and Review, in the Result and the Discussion Section by Saudi and Chinese Researchers

The contrastive rhetoric focuses on the impact of the culture of the writers on the language that they use as well as the organization that they adapt. Hence, the current study sheds the light on the similarities and the differences in the way that Saudi and Chinese researchers use the metatexts, the previews and the reviews. The investigation accounts for the frequencies and the relevant percentages of the use of the previews and the reviews in the results and discussion section in Saudi and Chinese research articles. The findings show Saudi and Chinese researchers have similar tendency in applying the metatexts in the research articles. The use of the preview is close with an increase in the Chinese research articles, whereas Saudi researchers adapted the reviews higher than the Chinese researchers. The results are significant for the pedagogical purposes as they provide insight regarding the writing pattern by different linguistic background.

Chinese Research Article Introductions: Move Analysis and Linguistic Features

Research on academic genre has received widespread attention from linguists around the world. In the big data era, the demand of knowledge mining promotes the emergence and development of bibliometrics, and formal description of scientific knowledge is also put on the agenda. The application of RA move analysis to the field of knowledge mining is a new perspective of bibliometrics. At present, there are few studies on move analysis of Chinese RA introductions, and fewer studies are oriented to discourse computing. This study analyzes the move structures of Chinese RA introductions and finds out some linguistic features corresponding to each move. It is found that nearly half of the Chinese RA introductions follow the CARS model, but there are also unconventional structures. The linguistic features, including citation, negation, connectives and sentence subjects, are helpful for the automatic identification of move structures of Chinese RA introductions.

중국어 학술지 논문에 나타난 부스터 표현에 대한 연구

The present study aims to compare and analyze the use of boosters in Chinese research articles of different disciplines and find out their similarities and differences. Boosters are the linguistic devices through which the writers or speakers express certainty about the propositional content. In research articles, the expression of commitment toward the propositional content enable writers to mark the information shared with readers, and to show authority as a member of the academic discourse community. This paper selects research articles of linguistics, sociology and biology, one of the representative disciplines of humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, respectively. By analyzing the types, frequencies, functions and distribution characteristics of boosters in journal papers, we could find out the similarities and differences in the usage of boosters in different academic fields and disciplines. We could also understand the mechanism that how boosters, as stance markers, perform interpersonal functions in academic discourse.

Research Trends in Crop-Livestock Systems: A Bibliometric Review.

Agricultural straw waste and livestock manure are often misplaced resources. The separation of planting and breeding has induced significant pressure on the environment. Thus, there is a growing need for a system that can integrate crop and livestock farming to improve resource efficiency. To clarify the current state of crop–livestock systems in China and elsewhere, a bibliometric analysis was conducted for a total of 18,628 published English and 3460 published Chinese research articles and dissertations on circular agriculture. The published research papers were taken from the ISI Web of Science and CNKI database to explore research hotpots, research methods, theme trends, and mainstream technical models of crop–livestock systems from 1981 to 2021. Recent progress in crop–livestock systems was analyzed from ecological, economic, social benefits, and stakeholder perspectives. The research results showed that compared with traditional agricultural models, crop–livestock systems had far more ecologic and social benefits, including gaining higher net income and input-output ratio, improving soil quality, and mitigating global warming. The drivers of crop–livestock systems’ development were also analyzed from stakeholders’ perspectives. The study provides insights into the development of circular agriculture by reducing the pollution risks of agricultural waste and improving both ecological and economic benefits of the system.

A Genre Analysis of English and Chinese Legal Research Article Abstracts: A Corpus-based Approach

Research article (RA) abstracts are generally viewed as the gateway to know the gist and major findings of a study. They also function as a “promotional” genre to attract readers’ interest and increase readership so as to better engage the authors in the academic communities. Although RA abstracts as a genre have been gaining more attention over the years, there is still a lack of study on RA abstracts in the field of law, let alone cross-linguistic study concerning them. Therefore, this study investigates English and Chinese legal RA abstracts from the perspective of genre, analyzes their move structures, frequency and features, and then compares the similarities and differences of them in two different languages. To this end, a corpus consisting of 60 RA abstracts was compiled, 30 randomly selected from three prestigious English law journals and 30 from three Chinese law journals. The move analysis was conducted based on an adjusted model of four moves. The results reveal that the moves of Introduction, Gap-filling and Contribution are obligatory while that of Methodology is optional in both languages. However, English abstracts, with more complicated move structures than Chinese ones, tend to state explicitly the purposes of study while Chinese abstracts show a preference for pointing out the “Gap” first.

A Cross-Linguistic Study of Interactional Metadiscourse in English and Chinese Research Articles by the Same Chinese Scholars

ABSTRACT This study investigates how Chinese scholars in Applied Linguistics construct different authorial stances in their English and Chinese research articles (RAs) by using interactional metadiscourse comprising boosters, hedges, and self-mentions. A specially designed corpus of 22 Chinese and 22 English RAs written by the same group of Chinese scholars was compiled and examined for metadiscourse forms and functions. We found that (a) while the Chinese scholars employed similar frequencies of boosters in both their Chinese and English RAs, they used significantly more hedges in their English RAs than in their Chinese RAs; (b) while they used more boosters than hedges in their Chinese RAs, a reverse pattern was found in their English RAs; (c) they used significantly more self-mentions, particularly first-person pronouns in their English RAs, than in their Chinese RAs. These findings indicate that the same Chinese scholars have displayed different epistemic stances and authorial identities in their Chinese-medium and English-medium publications.

A Corpus-based Study of Lexical Bundles in Rhetorical Moves of L1 and L2 Research Article Abstracts in Applied Linguistics

This paper aims to compare structural characteristics of lexical bundles in rhetorical moves of applied linguistics research abstracts written by two groups of L1 and L2 academic writers. This study makes a comparison of four-word lexical bundles frequency and structural types among five rhetorical moves. The corpora used in this comparative study were the Native Research Article Corpus for L1 writers and the Chinese Research Article Corpus for L2 writers, which made up of research article abstracts from both Chinese and international journals of applied linguistics from 2005 to 2015. The results show that L2 writers used more bundles than L1 writers did in the moves of purpose presenting the research (Move 2) and summarizing the findings (Move 4). In terms of lexical bundle structural types, both L1 and L2 writers used more VP-based lexical bundles than NP-based and PP-based bundles in each move. Compared with L1 writers, L2 writers demonstrated a tendency to overuse lexical bundles both in types and tokens. The findings may provide a good reference for academic writing instructions in English for academic purposes.

Development of distance education in Chinese higher education in perspectives of accessibility, quality and equity under COVID-19

PurposeThis paper aimed to explore the development of distance education (DE) in Chinese higher education as well as the three significant themes: accessibility, quality and equity in Chinese DE and the performance of these three themes in Chinese DE.Design/methodology/approachDocument analysis was used as the major research method in this study to examine the development and challenges in terms of accessibility, quality and equity in Chinese DE. In this study, national-level official policy documents and reports from the Chinese government were collected and analyzed. Also, scientific articles from CNKI were analyzed to find out the evolution of the Frontier topics on Chinese DE in accessibility, quality and equity.FindingsThere are three major findings. First, the Chinese government has shown its positive attitude toward DE in higher education. Second, compared with the other two themes: quality and equity; the number of articles in the accessibility of DE was lower than the other two themes and the problems of accessing online courses were insufficiently caused by two reasons due to lack of basic ICT literacy and poor Internet infrastructure. Third, there was a gap between Chinese policies and research articles mainly because of the unbalanced development of accessibility in policy management and research articles.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough this paper has summarized the development of the DE in Chinese higher education, it was clear that accessibility, quality and equity were three critical issues in DE. However, there are still other essential factors that contribute to the development of DE that requires further investigation, such as learner satisfaction, different features of learning platforms and instructional strategy.Practical implicationsThe findings of this paper can be used to identify the attitude toward the DE of the Chinese government. Besides, the accessibility could be a research and practical focus for Chinese DE in the future.Originality/valueThis study showed some significant policies released by the Chinese government toward DE in higher education and revealed the achievements, trends and challenges in the accessibility, quality and equity of Chinese DE.

Mapping music education research in Mainland China (2007–2019): A metadata-based literature analysis

This metadata-based literature study provides a comprehensive mapping of China’s music education by analysing 3,257 Chinese research articles published during 2007–2019. The selection of the articles is based on careful inspections of the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database and rigorous coding of literature attributes. The analysis of descriptive and analytical attributes showed (a) dominance of qualitative over quantitative/mixed-method research paradigm, (b) a strong preference for conceptual over empirical studies and (c) a policy-reinforced research orientation. The prime inference from the findings also raised concerns on several ‘neglected’ research areas and quality issues in the selected literature.

A Comparison of Entertain Strategies Used in English and Chinese Scientific Research Articles

Based on the engagement system of appraisal theory, this study made a comparative study of entertain strategies between English and Chinese scientific research articles. This study aimed to address the following two questions: (1) What are the similarities and differences of semantic resources expressing the meaning of entertain between English and Chinese scientific research articles? (2) Is there any quantitative difference in the entertain between English and Chinese scientific research articles? 30 English scientific research articles and 30 Chinese scientific research articles were compared from the qualitative and the quantitative perspectives. This article only focused on Result & Discussion section of English and Chinese scientific research articles. The results showed that English and Chinese scientific research articles generally use the similar semantic resources to express entertain meaning. As for the quantitative use, the frequency of entertain in English scientific research articles were significantly different from that in Chinese scientific research articles. This study may provide a new perspective for the comparative study of English and Chinese scientific discourses. These findings may also provide some pedagogical implications, especially for the teaching and learning of English academic writing.

Mediating cross-cultural differences in research article rhetorical moves in academic translation: A pilot corpus-based study of abstracts

Research on mediating cross-cultural differences in rhetorical conventions of research article abstracts (RAAs) between such culturally distant languages as English and Chinese is rare. This article aims to explore the differences in rhetorical preferences between independently produced English and Chinese research article abstracts and the strategies used in translating Chinese RAAs into English. RAAs published in three journals between 2006 and 2016 were selected to form three corpora: corpus A consisting of 32 English RAAs, corpus B made up of 38 Chinese RAAs, and corpus C including 38 English RAAs which are translations of the RAAs in corpus B. Corpus A and B form a comparable corpus while corpus B and C constitute a parallel corpus. Results suggest that Chinese and English RAAs have different preferences in rhetorical move patterns because the rhetorical moves of Product and Method are much more frequent in English RAAs compared with their Chinese counterparts, and that rhetorical foreignization is the dominant strategy in translating Chinese RAAs into English. Possible reasons of such rhetorical differences and the impact of this resistant strategy on the reception of the translated RAAs in the international community is discussed.