Literary research article abstracts: An analysis of rhetorical moves and their linguistic realizations

Abstract

Research article abstracts are the most effective means of sharing research results. This function and the evolution of the research article genre have kept the abstract in the focus of academic investigations. However, despite the impressive research output on abstracts, research addressing specifically literature research article (LRA) abstracts is scarce. This study, therefore, describes the move structure of the LRA abstract, defines the functions of the identified moves, and discusses their linguistic realizations. To conduct the research, a corpus consisting of 135 abstracts from four international journals with high impact factors was compiled and subjected (a) to move analysis performed by a human analyst and (b) to software-driven analyses involving text analysis software. The results reveal that LRA abstracts have a non-hierarchical eight-move structure with four stable moves, whose functions are to present the background, purpose, methodology and outcomes of the research. LRA abstracts are a mix of the descriptive and informative abstracts and structurally overlap with the rhetorical structure of RA introductions. They have high syntactic complexity and lexical density and contain primarily low frequency words. These features and their high information content make them difficult to process.