Research Scholar
Xingxia Yi, Department of Linguistics
Elizabeth Hume, Faculty advisor
Biography
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Xingxia Yi is a Chinese citizen. She received her M.A. in the department of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China in 2004. She works as associate professor for the department of Foreign Languages, Zhongkai University of Agriculture and Technology, Guangzhou, where she teaches Advanced Reading, Introduction to Linguistics, English for Academic Purposes. Her research interest is in the discourse analysis in light of Systemic Functional Linguistics, including the levels of language and their realization relationships (Meaning and Form), the systems of the three meta-functions and their sub-systems. She is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Dept. of Linguistics, The Ohio State University.
About the Research
Recent years have seen increasing attention being paid to the notion of genre. Adopting the systemic-functional approach, the present study makes an investigation of Agriculture English (AE) abstracts within the genre theoretical framework. The purpose here is to facilitate people's understanding of this genre.
The analysis is conducted at two levels: the level of generic structure and that of linguistic realization. Accordingly, we draw on Hasan's notion of Generic Structure Potential (GSP) and Halliday's metafunctional and lexico-grammatical framework as the main theoretical framework to rest upon. As for the data, 32 authentic AE abstracts are selected randomly from 5 SCI agriculture journals.
This paper explores the structural organization of abstracts at a macro level, and proposes a formula of the GSP for our data. Furthermore, it analyzes the prototypical experiential organizations in abstracts that are realized by the system of Transitivity. Our investigation of the transitivity patterns in our data reveals that our data abstracts are featured by the salience of relational processes, for a relational process functions to reflect what the writer considers to be the most important Tokens in the source article as well as their Values. And our comparative analysis of three generic elements (Research Design, Result of Study and Conclusion suggests that the communicative purpose of different generic sections influences and conditions the choice of Transitivity at each stage of a text. In the conclusion, the great implications for pedagogy are presented as well as some suggestions for future research.
