English Research Article Abstracts Across Disciplines: A Contrastive Genre Analysis

The communicative purpose of the abstract as a written genre is to generalize or summarize the content of the whole research article. By introducing the main content of the research, the abstract serves as a time-saving device communicating the author's latest research findings to the academic circle. However, there are limited genre analyses on RA abstracts to investigate the macro-linguistic structure and the linguistic features across disciplines despite the fact that the abstract is a miniature RA. The present study attempts to make an empirical contrastive genre analysis of the generic structures of 120 RA abstracts on a random basis in the disciplines of Applied Linguistics, Economics and Environmental Science which represent three different domains of the humanities, the social science and the natural science. Bruce's (1983) four-move pattern of I-M-R-D was employed in identifying the semantic units and Swales' (1990) move-step model was used to examine the macro-structure of the abstracts. At the micro-linguistic level, linguistic features including the length, use of tenses, and modal verbs are investigated in order to see whether these features have any relationship with disciplines and the communicative purposes of the moves.The results show that some degree of variation exists despite certain degree of homogeneity across the three fields. While the majority of the texts mirror the I-M-R-D pattern of the articles, significant cross-disciplinary differences are found. Environmental Science abstracts appear more complex and give large space to Methods and Discussion units than the other two disciplines. The step choice of sub-move and rhetorical expressions in Economy abstracts is monotonous than that in Linguistics abstracts. The abstract length, use of tenses, and modal verbs are also affected by disciplines.It is hoped that this study is of practical significance, as it has provided some specific guidance and suggestions for academic English writing. The limitations of the thesis are also discussed.