| As the miniature of the research article, an abstract is an important genre which serves as a time-saving device for readers'quickly capturing the main points of the whole paper, and by means of which the writers can keep up with advances in their fields and promote their new knowledge within academic community. Yet, despite the important communicative functions they serve, the abstracts continue to remain a neglected field among discourse analysis. Though there have been some genre studies on the rhetorical organization of the research article abstracts and their stylistic features, as for linguistic and mathematic research article abstracts analysis, it is still scarce.In this paper, the corpora were randomly selected from 5 key journals of linguistics and 5 of mathematics in 2005 respectively, then 39 linguistic journal article abstracts in English were selected, corresponding with 39 journal article abstracts written in Chinese, and 45 mathematic journal article abstracts in English corresponding with 45 mathematic journal article abstracts in Chinese. Bhatia's (1993) four-move pattern of PMRC (purpose, method, results, and conclusion) was employed in identifying the semantic units in this study. The linguistic feature of lexis was also examined.The results show that some degree of variation exists despite a certain degree of homogeneity between the abstracts of linguistics and those of mathematics. The main findings are as follows:①The discourse structure of both linguistic and mathematic journal article abstracts is five-move pattern—Background-Purpose-Method-Results-Conclusion. Among the five-move pattern, M1 (background) is absent in Bhatia's (1993) pattern. This means Chinese writers like to put background introduction as an important part in the abstract writing.②Comparing linguistic journal article abstracts with mathematic journal article abstracts, linguistic journal article abstracts emphasize more on M1 (background) both in English and Chinese. In linguistic journal article abstracts, the percentage of M1"background"in the abstracts written in English is 48.7%. Among the abstracts written in Chinese, M1"background"accounts for 64.1%. However, in mathematic journal article abstracts, the move"background"only accounts for 17.8% in both the abstracts written in English and Chinese. This means that the linguistic research article abstracts (social science) emphasize more on M1 (background) rather than other moves comparing with mathematic RA abstracts (natural science).③Concerning the moves which the abstract contained, most of the abstracts concentrate on 2 moves, 3 moves and 4 moves patterns both in linguistic and mathematic fields. Among all the patterns, the most frequently occurring pattern is 3-move abstracts. As to the 5 moves pattern, the linguistic article abstracts written in English account for 2.6%, the linguistic article abstracts in Chinese account for 7.7% while in mathematic journal article abstracts, there is no 5 moves pattern. This means that one abstract should contain at least 2, 3 or 4 moves among the 5 basic moves, and then it can perfect its basic function in the article.④Concerning the lexis characteristics, among the first ten frequently occurring words of the linguistic and mathematic journal article abstracts, some words are shared in the two disciplines in the abstracts written both in English and in Chinese. In the English abstracts, the shared words are"show","discuss","use"and in the Chinese abstracts, the shared words are"通过""指出""运用""结果". These results show that the two disciplines have some similarities and differences in the abstract writing.As a whole, this study examines the main discourse structures of linguistic and mathematic journal article abstracts, and their main linguistic characteristics. It is hoped that this study can enrich the current knowledge of the RA genre and provide the basis for a genre-based approach to academic reading and writing for postgraduates and novice teachers in the field of applied linguistics. At the same time, it also assists and hints the researchers in their reading and writing of high quality abstracts. |
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