Genre Structure and Citation

Abstract

This chapter reviews the pertinent literature for this study. As the study is mainly concerned with move structure and citation features of the introductory phase of the ERA, the chapter is organized into two parts: genre analysis of RAs as a particular research genre and citation study. The first four sections (Sects. 2.1–2.4) comprise the first part: Sect. 2.1 outlines the conceptualizations of genre and related terminology such as communicative purposes, discourse community, moves, steps and rhetorical strategies, and reviews the three main approaches to genre analysis, viz., the New Rhetoric (NR) approach, the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach, and the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) approach; Sect. 2.2 addresses the different types of RAs, the macro-structure and the major sections of RAs; Sects. 2.3 and 2.4 focus on the rhetorical structure of the Introduction section and other introductory parts respectively. Following these, in Sect. 2.5, a comprehensive review of literature on citation is presented, which constitutes the second important part of this chapter. The final section summarizes the preceding sections and concludes the chapter.