Linguistic and rhetorical contrastive analysis of medical and linguistic journal abstracts: Contrasting abstracts written in English and Spanish (Spanish text)

This thesis aims to describe how scientists and academics present their findings and how language functions in extremely specialized circumstances. Our hypothesis is that writers from different academic backgrounds and from different cultural settings tend to behave differently in their writing habits. as an independent genre, describing the working context of research article of articles written by experienced English-speaking and Spanish-speaking authors and published in journals from 1993–1999. These articles were chosen randomly. In our study we have focused our attention on the linguistic and textual features of the discourse and on its rhetorical movement analysis in terms of the “Create a Research Space” (CARS) model, offered by Swales (1990). Also, we have concentrated on the textual features recommended review of previous publications enable us to conclude that the discourse of and areas of study. This may be mainly due to the tendency towards uniformity in academic writing and the universal character of science. In spite of this, there are some interesting differences between both cultures and both areas of study. In general we have noted several characteristics typical of the Spanish language such as a greater use of the passive voice and of longer sentence, and a lesser number of discourse markers. Also, we find that there is considerable variation in the use of rhetorical structures, the one with a higher number of instances being that of “purpose-recommendation”. as well as of the present tense and of discourse markers. The fact that these texts also have a greater number of metadiscourse markers implies a larger degree of persuasion in them. In conclusion, our study corroborates other researchers's findings that there exists differences in the working habits of scientists and academics related to cultural and academic backgrounds.