METADISCURSIVE NOUNS IN ACADEMIC ABSTRACTS: A CORPUS-BASED COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MUSIC STUDENTS’ DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS IN CHINA AND THE US

The growing interests in metadiscursive noun make it a heated topic for scholars to conduct various intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary researches in this field. However, the research about academic writing in the discipline of music still remains blank. This article makes a comparative study to explore the use of all categories of metadiscursive nouns in a corpus of 40 English abstracts of music students’ doctoral dissertations in China and the US. The research results have indicated: 1) L1 students of English tend to use more metadiscursive nouns to express their stance and promote their research; 2) They also employ diverse lexico-syntactic structures to encapsulate these metadiscursive nouns, thus making the abstracts coherently link together; 3) Students from China and the US both prefer to use entity nouns in “Determiner+N” sentence pattern. This comparative study has pedagogical implications for EFL teaching in China and raises Chinese music students’ awareness to improve their academic writing skills.