Abstract
This thesis makes an investigation into the conjunctive relation of reformulation in scientific reports from the perspective of systemic functional grammar. Through the analysis of twenty scientific reports collected from the weekly magazine New Scientist, we explore the types and realizations of reformulation relations presented in the data, and provide an interpretation of the linguistic phenomena in terms of genre and ideology. In our research, we find that the reformulation relation is rich in the genre of scientific reports, because its property of elaborating an idea in diverse ways just corresponds to the aim of scientific reports. In addition, other properties of the genre such as the targeted reader of laymen, the empirical nature of the content, and the source from academic journals all contribute to the abundance of reformulation relations. On the other hand, our research indicates that reformulation relations can be realized between two discourse units of diverse sizes, including noun phrases, clauses, paragraphs, etc., which breaks the traditional discussion focused on the conjunctive relation between clauses alone. With the extension of the notion of conjunction, it is argued that the organization of a text can be illustrated in a hierarchical structure with two levels of reformulation. At the first level, the topic sentence, which is often the first clause of the text, is reformulated by other clauses in the first paragraph. At the second level, the first paragraph, which contains the first level of reformulation, is reformulated by the other paragraphs of the text. Such a structure demonstrates how the writer elaborates his idea from general to particular. Furthermore, it is concluded from our research that the genre of scientific reports generally presents five stages, including topical statement, background information, research methodology, result & discussion, and afterthought, each of which demonstrates a distinctive function. The presence and arrangement of the stages in scientific reports actually serve to make the magazine laymen-friendly, so that it might be able to draw more readers and become more popular. The social context-ideology influences and explains the observed linguistic presentation. As for the application of our research, the study of reformulation relations in scientific reports equips English teachers for teaching reading and writing when necessary.