The Explicit and Implicit Authorʼs Voice in the Rhetorical Structure of Abstracts in English and Serbian

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse the impact of linguistic, disciplinary, and cultural context on the properties of research paper abstracts in mechanical engineering and social sciences written in English and Serbian. Lexico grammatical properties were analysed by comparing the use of personal and impersonal forms and their distribution in rhetorical macrostructures (Swales 2005). All abstracts in the corpus are predominantly impersonal, with the absence of personal pronouns referring to the authors and prevailing passive structures in mechan­ical engineering abstracts. Therefore, the results confirm that the standardised rhetorical structure of mechanical engineering abstracts is reflected at the lexico-grammatical level. On the other hand, social science abstracts in English contain a great number of inanimate agentive forms, which help the authors to present their work in an indirect manner. Namely, these phrases can serve as indicators of disciplinary, as well as linguistic, differences that may be of use to Serbian authors when they want to write in English.