A Study On The Genre Of Research Article Abstracts In English

The abstract is a significant section of a research article. However,few empirical analyses of research article (RA) abstracts have been made,still fewer of the comparison of research article abstracts across disci-plines.In this thesis, abstracts of 300 research articles, 100 each from theSSCI journals of linguistics and the SCI journals with high impact ofmathematics and computer science, were randomly sampled and ana-lyzed from two perspectives. Macroscopically, according to Swales'(1990)Create a Research Space (CARS) model , the discourse structures of theseresearch article abstracts were investigated in terms of communicativepurposes of moves and then compared. Microscopically, the linguisticfeatures, such as the option of verb tenses and voices and the use modalverbs, were identified and analyses as to them were made by means ofchi- square test in statistics in order to see whether these features wouldhave any relationship with disciplines and the communicative purposesof moves.It was found that there were normally five moves in these abstracts,for example,'research background (move 1)','research topic (move 2)'and'research method (move 3)'. Moves of most abstracts followed afixed order except a few which had a order reversal or a recurrence ofmoves. The difference in the frequency of moves was discovered to besignificant in abstracts from the three disciplines, too. On the other hand,in terms of the linguistic features, the use of modal verbs was affected bythe communicative functions of moves, and the choice of verb tenses andvoices by disciplines as well as by moves.These findings provide the enlightenment in pedagogy, helping Chi-nese students and researchers write research article abstracts effectively.