A Genre Analysis Of Research Article Abstracts In Linguistics

Abstract, as the miniature of the research article, 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, abstracts continue to remain a neglected field among discourse analysts (Swales, 1990). There has been very little genre research on the rhetorical organization of the research article (RA) abstracts and their stylistic features, let alone the RA abstracts in the discipline of linguistics.Following ESP genre analysis, this thesis attempts to explore the generic structure and some particular linguistic features of RA abstracts in linguistics and discuss the similarities and differences between English linguistic RA abstracts written by native-English-speakers and Chinese scholars in terms of their rhetorical organization and genre-specific features.The corpus for this study consists of 80 English RA abstracts, the half of which are selected at random from two leading international journals in the area of linguistics - TESOL Quarterly and Applied Linguistics and the remainder of which are randomly selected from two prestigious Chinese linguistic journals - Foreign Language Teaching and Research and Journal of Foreign Languages.The results reveal that the global organization of linguistic RA abstracts is identified as six moves: Announcing the importance of the field - Introducing the current research - Presenting the methodology - Stating the results - Discussing the findings - Claiming the implications. The emergence of the two Moves "Announcing the importance of the field" and "Claiming the implications" is the major departure from the widely reported IMRD (Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion) structure, indicating the disciplinary influences on this genre. Besides, the embedding with other moves appears to be the salient feature of the Move "Presenting the methodology" while 100% frequency of occurrence foregrounds the Move "Stating the results" as...