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中口头报告和书面报告所用英语的差异，并探讨造成这种差异的因素。本研究包括语料库的编制、文本分析和讨论口头报告与书面论文的差异性质三个部分。这些口头报告是在1988 - 1997年举行的四次国际非晶材料会议上记录的，并由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。10对（共约75，000字）为机器可读形式，并将在获得 ...更多信息 对这10对句式的句法特征进行了统计分析。有限和非有限的条款，名词化，被动和连词的频率进行了统计和调查，以发现这些学术口语和书面文本相比，在LOB和伦敦-隆德语料库的文本类别是否不同。关于LOB和伦敦-隆德的数据见Biber（1988）。研究发现，学生在口头报告和书面报告中存在显著差异，并对语篇的主位组织和信息结构进行了分析。口语和书面学术语篇在主位组织的衔接手段上存在显著差异。在信息结构方面，口头报告与书面报告相比，具有结尾加重和语气淡化的特点，本文提出了一个语篇实现模型来解释这些特点。该模型表明，这些特征是特定语域中所采用的话语策略的结果，而语域决定了整个话语结构。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