| As the most widely used language in the contemporary world, English is playing an increasingly important role for international communication in the academic community. Being the carrier of research articles, journals serve as a commonly used channel for international academic communication by providing the readers with information about the latest development in their fields. English abstracts, as an important part of research articles (hereafter referred to as RAs), bear the essential elements of the articles and serve as the bridge and media of knowledge dissemination, academic communication and cooperation across countries. A well-written abstract can not only attract the readers, but also increase the chances of the paper to be indexed and cited. In the meantime, a concise abstract may save the readers'time and help them withdraw the necessary information efficiently. Therefore, study on English abstracts is thought to be quite meaningful.Analyzing discourses in academic and research settings from the perspective of genre has been a popular trend in the recent two decades. Swales (1990), one of the pioneers of genre analysis, regards research article abstracts as a genre. However, a review of previous genre studies reveals that former studies on RA abstracts are limited in number and scope. In view of this, a comparatively comprehensive genre analysis of RA abstracts is also imbued with theoretical value.Based on a self-established corpus, this study attempts to make a genre analysis on the RA abstracts from two disciplines by Non-Chinese research article writers (hereafter referred to as NCRAWs) and Chinese research article writers (hereafter referred to as CRAWs). The corpus is composed of 120 abstracts, with half of them from each discipline. The sub-corpora of each discipline are further divided into two even ones according to the nationality of their writers; hence four sub-corpora have been molded. Employing the modified five-move model which is based on Graetz's four-move model, the present study conducts a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary genre analysis by also covering some salient linguistic features.The major findings of this study are: 1) The generic structure of abstracts from the four sub-corpora show much consistence. 2)Simple present tense is found to be the dominant tense, and passive voice is reported as the prominent grammatical voice in Move 3 from each sub-corpus. 3)Cross-disciplinary difference mainly exists in that no first personal pronoun has been found in abstracts from Civil Engineering, but 16 occurrences have been identified in abstracts from Applied Linguistics. Grammatical voice also displays cross-disciplinary difference in that the active voice dominates abstracts from Applied Linguistics, while in the sub-corpora of Civil Engineering, passive voice prevails. 4)The cross-cultural variation is manifested in the generic structure of abstracts and the use of hedging devices. NCRAWs tend to write abstracts with more complicated structure, and more hedges than CRAWs.The results indicate that RA abstracts, as a genre, have their own generic characteristics. However, due to the differences in the writers'disciplinary and cultural background, this genre may exhibit some variations. This study is expecting to provide some helpful reference for the researchers to read or write the RA abstracts adequately, quickly and effectively, and to shed light on academic writing teaching, and even on foreign language teaching as a whole.
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