英语论文网

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Rationale of the Study
As a means of social practice, academic discourse plays a significant role in thedevelopment of science. Academic discourse is an umbrella term for a rich variety ofsub-discourses, such as research articles, conference papers, academic speeches, M. A.theses, Ph. D. dissertation, academic reports and so on. Since the 1970s, scholars invarious fields have investigated into academic discourse. Illustrated from differentfields within different frameworks, academic discourse has aroused a great interestamong scholars. Academic discourse used to be regarded as nothing but objective orimpersonal statements (Hunston & Thompson, 2000). Some experts thought thatlanguage in academic discourse is no more than a decoration during the knowledgeprocessing (Bazerman et al. 2005). But now the dialogism in it has been widelyacknowledged. At the same time when the authors present their research findings,they are also having an interpersonal interaction with readers (Hyland, 2005;Thompson, 2001). By means of academic discourse, scholars exchange their ideas andreport their research results to advance the development of their disciplines.As Weber (1977) proposes, every system attempts to establish and cultivate thebelief in its legitimacy. Academic discourse is no exception. It not only presentsresearch findings, but also explains and legitimates them. Van Leeuwen (2008) pointsout that the contextually specific legitimation will help answer the spoken orunspoken questions “Why should we do this?” or “Why should we do this in thisway?”
..........

1.2 Significance of Study
It has been broadly argued that academic discourse stands out as a highlyrhetorical construct with overlapping communicative goals to persuade the readersabout the validity of claims (Swales, 2004). That is to say, authors not only share newknowledge with the academic community but also make use of some linguisticstrategies to convince their audience of the reliability and validity of their researchfindings. These linguistic strategies are known as legitimation strategies according tovan Leeuwen (2008).Studies on academic discourse from different perspectives are abundant both athome and abroad, but the studies on legitimation strategies in academic discourse arefew and far between. By conducting contrastive analysis on legitimation strategies insoft science research articles and hard science research articles, this thesis will surelyoffer a better understanding about the legitimation strategies in research articlesadopted by English native speakers, thus offering a framework of reference to theChinese scholars who want to publish their researches on the international journals.Hopefully, the present study can be of benefit to the Chinese scholars byproviding some guidance so that they are in a better position to share their researchwith the international colleagues in an increasingly globalized world.
........

Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Relevant Studies on Academic Discourse
Since 1980, scholars started to pay a lot of attention to academic discourse fromthe respective of discourse analysis and corpus study. There are three major areasduring the past 10 years: Swales’ (1990) genre analysis, Hyland’s (2004)meta-discourse analysis and Halliday’s (1994) Systemic Functional Grammar.The research into academic discourses began from Swales (1990), whoi