iReasearch学术科研网

Much literature shows that genre analysis has been widely used in research on the discourse structure and the linguistic features of research article (RA) abstracts. However, few studies have paid attention to the RA abstracts’rhetorical relations. Using 100 RA abstracts in English and another 100 in Chinese as the corpora, this study compared the distributions of the rhetorical relations in English and Chinese and investigated how English and Chinese RA abstracts construct discourse. It was found that the essential rhetorical relations in both English and Chinese abstracts were the relations of elaboration, preparation, background, conjunction and explanation; in Chinese abstracts more evaluation and elaboration relations are more likely to be presented whereas in English abstracts more evidence relations are shown and antithesis relations are expressed so as to reveal the research gap.