Capture to Communicate: Rhetorical Move 1 in the Abstracts of Hard and Soft Science Post-Graduate Dissertations

Abstract

Academic work is usually evaluated by the quality of its abstract which serves as a concise summary of the research findings. Therefore, the study aims to investigate the rhetorical structure of Move1 in the abstracts of post-graduate dissertations from both Hard Science and Soft Science disciplines. The paper intends to answer three main questions: how is Move1 manifested in terms of its text length? What are the most frequently used Sub-Move patterns of Move1? What are the most common lexical collocations used in Move1? To answer these questions, the study uses Santos’ (1996) framework to analyze a corpus of 100 abstracts selected randomly, 50 from Hard Science and 50 from Soft Science. The findings have revealed that Move1 in Soft Science might use more sentences than those in Hard Science. The findings have also shown that both disciplines rely on Sub-Move-A, stating current knowledge, and Sub-Move2, stating the research gap, as essential for communicating their ideas while the other Sub-Moves were rarely used. In terms of lexical collocations, while post-graduates in both disciplines frequently used the Adjective+Noun lexical collocation as their preferred structure to construct M1, the use of the other lexical collocations varied in both disciplines. The study concluded that Move1 is considered obligatory in situating the research, establishing its context, and capturing and communicating findings. Besides the pedagogical implications suggested, the study’s findings hopefully contribute to the development of abstract move-schema theory, enhance scholarly understanding of Move1 characteristics, and guide future research in the field.