Contrastive Analysis on the Linguistic Features of the English Abstracts of Scientific Paper by Chinese and English Authors

Based on the theory of stylistics,the author employs corpus analysis methods to examine the major differences between the abstracts by Chinese and foreign authors in terms of linguistic features and information structures. The author finds that there are obvious differences between the abstracts by Chinese and foreign writers in terms of length of the abstracts, word families, tense and voice. Chinese writers tend to use more short sentences, more simple past tense and more passive voice in their abstracts. Practical writing instructions are proposed in the paper to facilitate Chinese writers to improve the quality of their English abstracts and help them gain more access to international recognition and promote academic exchange. Such instructions include: the content of the abstracts should follow the structure of purpose, method, results and conclusion, simple present tense should be more frequently used and active voice should be more widely used.