Chapter One Introduction
The abstract is an essential part of the linguistic journal article. Located in thebeginning of the journal article, abstracts are employed to summarize the main contentand methodology of the research papers in a clear and compelling way so that thereaders can grasp the gist of the research articles in a short time. At present, very fewlinguistic journals both at home and abroad would not require the submission ofresearch papers with abstracts. Many journals published in languages other than Englishalso require the submission of an English version of the abstract (Lores, 2004; Ventola,1993). As is known, most linguistic journals in China require English abstracts. "Morethan 75% of Chinese core journals request articles with English abstracts” and “moreand more journals regards the articles with English abstracts as one of the requisites ofselecting condition” (Lu, J.，2009: 194). The purpose of English abstracts is to realizethe international exchange and communication among the academic community.However, most translated English abstracts are of poor quality and “intolerable” (ibid.)and cannot reach the international standard, which makes the importance of abstractswriting and translation very visible.Scholars both at home and abroad have made extensive studies on abstracts, withmost studies associating with the generic features and language use. Apparently,domestic concentration is mostly on comparing between Chinese abstracts and Englishones and how to write appropriate English abstracts. Besides, scholars also makeattempts to analyze the abstracts in one certain discipline or among several disciplinesfrom the perspective of stylistics. Generally speaking, previous studies abroad onabstracts consist of two aspects: the macrostructure of abstracts and the features oflanguage use. Their focus is mainly on abstracts writing and polishing. While domesticstudies on abstracts range from writing skills and translating techniques of abstracts tothe comparison between Chinese and English academic abstracts. The focus of theinvestigation shifts from lexical and syntactical level to textual level. The studiespresent the characteristics of multiperspective and crossdisciplinary.All in all, previous studies on abstracts are either concerned with writing properacademic abstracts or rather analyze the generic structures an
