Forms and functions of vague language in academic journal article abstracts

Gabriela Cusen

doi:10.17684/i9a133en

Abstract

This paper reports on an exploratory investigation of the IMRaD moves (Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion) which show the degree of informativeness in terms of referential explicitness of academic texts and of use of vague language in academic journal abstracts published in 2010 and 2011. The areas of research these articles focus on are: language and linguistics, literature and cultural studies. The analysis of the data, based on an existing analytical framework (Cutting, 2012), revealed that authors use vague language (e.g.: ‘general nouns’, ‘hedging devices’ and ‘vague quantifiers’) and that the abstracts mostly consist of the introduction and discussion moves. Results of research into the writing of article abstracts may benefit both novice academic text writers and academics guiding their work.

Highlights

When academics decide to publish their research articles in scientific journals, they need to write abstracts for their work and abide by the instructions of the editors in so doing
This paper reports on an exploratory study of abstracts for articles published in English in an academic journal—“Bulletin of Transilvania
The data corpus for this exploratory study consists of 62 academic journal article abstracts published between 2010–2011 in the “Bulletin of Transilvania University of Brașov”, Romania, Series IV, Issue 1 (2010) and Issues 1 and 2 (2011): Philology and Cultural Studies. 26 abstracts belonging to the domain of Language and Linguistics (L&L) and 2 abstracts for articles focusing on Literature (L) were collected from the issue of the 2010 Bulletin

Summary

Introduction

When academics decide to publish their research articles in scientific journals, they need to write abstracts for their work and abide by the instructions of the editors in so doing. University of Brașov”, Romania—to identify forms and functions of vague language used by authors and to discuss the genre of academic journal article abstracts (AJAs) in terms of IMRaD moves. There are two major parts of this work, i.e., first there is a review of work on vague language from a both theoretical and research perspective (see for example, Channell, 1994; Drave, 2001; Cutting, 2007, 2012) followed by a description of what Cutting Starting from the well-known truth that “[a]ny social group sharing interests and knowledge employs non-specificity in talking about their shared interest” (p. 193), Channell (1994) states that an expression or word is vague if: a) it can be contrasted with another word or expression which appears to render the same proposition; b) it is purposely and unabashedly vague or c) the meaning arises from intrinsic uncertainty (1994, p. 20).

Objectives

Methods

Conclusion