A Contrastive Study of Exemplification across Chinese and Western Scholars:A Local Grammar Perspective
Exemplification is a key discourse act and argumentative method to explicate academic knowledge.In recent years,the use of exemplification in academic discourse has been the concern of academic discourse research.Current research on exemplification in academic discourse tends to be conducted from a contrastive perspective,observing mainly the form-meaning variations of exemplifying language across disciplines,historical periods or language proficiency levels.The similarities and differences of the use of exemplification across scholars from different language/cultural backgrounds remain unexplored.Such that,this study uses the"local grammar"approach in corpus linguistics to analyze Chinese and Western linguists'meaning tendencies and characteristic meanings in the exemplifying language in their published English research articles and further explores the variations of the semantic regularities of exemplifying language across the two language user groups.The results show that the two groups show clear differences in the use of meanings in exemplifying language,forming respective characteristic meaning tendencies and regularities.Chinese scholars tend to use significantly fewer exemplifying expressions,make significantly fewer references to previous studies as examples,but more actively use the engagement discourse strategy to direct readers'attention to the content of the examples,and more actively postulate the examples to explain the knowledge in a logical order from general to specific.Western scholars,on the other hand,prefer to exemplify previous research,weaken the effect of examples on contextualization,and foreground the examples to generalize knowledge in a logical order from specific to general.These differences in expressing exemplification reflect the important influence of mother tongue culture on the academic language of different groups of scholars.
exemplificationlocal grammarcontrastive studyacademic discourse study
国家科技期刊平台
NSTL
万方数据
维普
