A Study Of Move Structure And Linguistic Features Across Moves In International Applied Linguistics Journal Article Abstracts

The abstract is an essential and inalienable part of a research article,through which readers can get a glimpse of the whole article's main content.Due to the important role the abstract fulfills in the research article,it has received considerable attention from scholars at home and abroad.There have been many studies on the move structures of abstracts as well as some studies on the linguistic features of s,but few of them focus on the linguistic features of abstracts across moves.Therefore,the present corpus-based study examines 97 abstracts from three leading international applied linguistics journals published in recent three years based on the five-move generic structure model proposed by Santos(1996)in terms of move structures and linguistic features across moves.The corpus-based genre analysis was adopted as the research method.The results showed that the most frequently used move structure was Move 2,Move 3,Move 4,Move 5.The simple present tense was used more frequently in Move 1,Move 2 and Move 5,while the simple past tense usually occurred in Move 3 and Move 4.The active voice was the preferred voice in each move,except Move 3.First-person pronouns usually occurred in Move 3,while meta-discourse expressions often occurred in Move 2 and Move 5.The implications and limitations of this study are also discussed.