A Corpus-based Study Of Lexico-grammatical Realizations Of The Problem Move In Research Article Abstracts

Abstracts are essential and vital for research articles. Previous scholars haveproposed the discourse structure of abstracts. Bhatia(1993) presented a four movestructure for an abstract which is introducing purpose, describing methodology,summarizing results and presenting conclusions (IMRC). Hoey(1983) proposed theproblem-solution pattern which is situation, problem, response and evaluation.According to the two scholars, there is a problem move which states the researchobjective of a particular research in an abstract.In order to understand the lexical and grammatical realization in the problemmove of research article abstracts, the present thesis made a corpus-based study of thelexical and grammatical features of the problem move in research article abstractsbased on Hoey’s problem-solution pattern, Bhatia’s move structure and Winter’svocabulary classification, and discussed the initiation of the problem move by usingWordsmith5.0and Excel.The corpus used in this research includes one hundred and twenty SCI and SSCIresearch article abstracts published in2010. Based on the identified clause anddiscourse patterns of research article abstracts, the paper first investigated problemsignaling words and their classifications. Then collocation and colligation of theproblem signaling words were explored. Tense and voice features for the problemmove were also studied. Finally, ways to initiating the problem move in researcharticle abstracts were discussed.Findings show that the initiation of problem move is realized by varioussignaling vocabularies as classified by Winter in particular sentence patterns ofparticular tenses and voices. Meanwhile, the research results complement the researchof problem move in research article abstracts.Findings have implications on composing the problem move of research articleabstracts and offer English learners new ways of vocabulary learning. What’s more, the research has presented a primary way to build a small corpus, which is helpful tolanguage learners and researchers as well.