A Comparative Discourse Analysis of Oral Presentations and Written Papers in the Field of Natural Science

本研究的目的是找出自然科学领域的口头报告和书面论文中使用的英语的差异，并检查造成这种差异的因素。本研究由三个部分组成：语料库的汇编、文本的分析和口头报告和书面论文差异的性质的讨论。本文作者编写的语料库的特点是，将同一位科学家的一篇具有相同标题的口头报告和一篇已发表的论文配对在一起。这些口头报告记录在1988年至1997年举行的四次非晶材料国际会议上，并由本文作者在英语自然科学家的帮助下转录。书面副本摘自会议记录。十对（共约75,000字）是机器可读的形式，在获得论文作者的书面许可后，将以CD-ROM的形式提供给语言学家。从句法特征上对这10对进行了统计分析。统计和调查了有限和非有限分句、名词化、被动和连词的频率，以发现这些学术口语和书面文本与LOB和London-Lund语料库中的文本类别是否不同。关于LOB和London-Lund的数据见Biber（1988）。在口头报告和书面报告中发现了显著的差异。研究了语篇的主题组织和信息结构。口语和书面语篇在主题组织的衔接手段方面存在显著差异。在组织信息方面，与书面论文相比，口头报告具有最终权重和缓和特征。本文提出了一个话语实现模型来解释这些特征。该模型表明，这些特征是特定语域所采用的语篇策略决定了整个语篇结构的结果。少

The aim of the present study is to find differences of the English used in oral presentations and written papers in the field of natural science and to examine the factors causing the differences. The present study consists of three parts : compilation of a corpus, analysis of the texts and discussion of the nature of the differences in oral presentations and written papers.The corpus compiled by the present writer is characteristic in that an oral presentation and a published paper with identical titles by a single scientist are paired together. The oral presentations were recorded in four international conferences on amorphous materials held from 1988 to 1997 and transcribed by the present writer with the help of English-native natural scientists. The written counterparts were taken from the proceedings of the conferences. Ten pairs (approximately 75,000 words in total) are in machine-readable form, and are to be provided for linguists on CD-ROM on obtaining the written permission of … More the authors of the papers.Statistical analysis was made of the ten pairs in terms of syntactic features. The frequency of finite and nonfinite clauses, nominalisations, passive and conjuncts was counted and investigated to discover whether these academic spoken and written texts differed in comparison with text categories in the LOB and London-Lund corpora. The data concerning LOB and London-Lund are in Biber (1988). Significant differences were found in the oral presentations and written papers.Thematic organisations and information structure of the discourse were investigated. Significant differences are found between spoken and written academic discourse in terms of the cohesive devices used for thematic organisation. In structuring information, oral presentations have end-weight and down-toning features compared to written papers.A discourse realization model has been presented to explain these features. The model shows that these features result from discourse strategies adopted in a specific register which determine the total discourse structure. Less