Abstract
Across the academic world, abstracts may often serve a primary promotional function. However, it has also long been accepted that each academic field has its own perception of exactly what it means to be interesting and authoritative. Although abstracts in many disciplines have been extensively researched, so far those from the academic area of law have received little attention. This paper applies techniques of qualitative and quantitative analysis to 200 abstracts from four academic law journals (two European, two US based), and finds that their structure and language reflect specifically legal discourses of persuasion. Areas of commonality between the abstracts from European and US journals are discussed, while differences are analysed in terms of the underlying legal cultures.
Highlights
Much recent interest has focused on persuasive aspects of text types that have classically been regarded as informative or argumentative
In EBLR, the typical macrostructure consisted of fewer moves, as in the following example: The article analyzes whether the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is legally capable of enforcing human rights in China through trade sanctions
A final point about the issue statement is that its formulation, whether as a question or as a nominalised issue, is generally characterised by neutral lexis, and may be merged with references to method: “this article studies the effects of accounting fraud on the product market”, or “we investigate how bankruptcy use relates to countries' creditor rights and judicial efficiency”
Summary
Much recent interest has focused on persuasive aspects of text types that have classically been regarded as informative or argumentative. Even though the abstract is often superficially regarded as informative, a “neutral summary” of a text which “adds no new information, summarises” (Purdue Online Writing Lab), in reality its function is, at the very least, to draw attention to the importance of the paper, and perhaps to ensure that it is accepted for a conference or a journal Against this background, it might be claimed that the entire abstract has a persuasive function: particular aspects such as lexical choice or pronoun use, and the text structure which foregrounds the main points of the paper, the strength and clarity of the claims made, and so on. The issue of authorial presence and agency, which is present transversally throughout the moves, will be handled separately
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