Generic Structure And Linguistic Features Of Results Units In Abstracts Of Research Articles

Over the past30years has witnessed the great development of genre analysis of Research Articles. As a concise summary of the whole paper, an abstract, especially the informative abstract, is a short cut for readers to have a general understanding of the study. Previous studies of abstracts mainly centered on the macro-structural perspective, establishing a well-accepted IMRD model, namely, Introduction unit, Methods unit, Results unit and Discussion unit (Swales,1990; Bhatia,1994). Among them, Results unit is a medium of presenting the major findings to the potential readers. It can be of great importance to arouse the readers’attention to judge whether they want to read the article more or not. According to the literature, there are some achievements on the generic structure and linguistic features of Results sections, and several linguistic features of Results units carried out by the previous studies of abstracts. However, there is little study on the genre analysis of Results units. Hence, in this paper, based on the genre of Results sections in applied linguistic discipline proposed by Yang Ruiying (2006), we aim to uncover the typical generic structure and linguistic features of Results units in the abstracts from the same domain.With the help of Random Number Generator,180abstracts are collected from three periodicals published in the applied linguistic discipline from the year2008to2012, of which the168abstracts contain the Results units.By genre analysis, the findings have shown great similarities to the previous studies on Results sections that the Results units consist of three major Moves: Preparatory information Move, Reporting results Move and Commenting on results Move, with the last two Moves being obligatory. Similar to the Results sections, in Results units, Commenting on results Move also comprises four Steps. The difference mainly exists in the variable frequency of each Step. Regarding the linguistic features, the verbs with simple present tense and active voice share the most percentages in Results units. Modal verbs are most frequently used in Results units, compared with other three units in the abstracts."Can" and "may" are the top two favored choices. Subjects and predicate, signaling results, consist of the lexical signals, which always co-occur in the Results units.The outcome of this study may be applied for the further study on the Results units, supporting the researches of other disciplines. Meanwhile, it may help the learners to better understand academic writing and to writers who want to publish their Research Articles in English academic journals.