Research Article Abstracts Research Articles

Interactive metadiscourse markers in Turkish research article abstracts: a diachronic analysis

Ust soylem, yazar-okuyucu iliskisini kuran ve bir metni okur dostu yapan onemli bir dilsel kaynaktir. Ust soylem belirleyicilerini art zamanli olarak inceleyen arastirmalar oldukca azdir. Bu calisma, 2008- 2009 ve 2017-2018 yillarinda Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi, Dilbilim Arastirmalari Dergisi, Dil Dergisi’nde yayimlanan arastirma makalelerinin Turkce ozetlerinde kullanilan baglayicilar, cerceve belirleyiciler, metin ici belirleyiciler, tanitlayicilar, kod cozumleyiciler gibi etkilesimli belirleyicileri arastirmayi amaclamaktadir ve Hyland’in (2005) kisiler arasi ust soylem modelini kuramsal cerceve olarak ele almaktadir. Bu calismanin bulgulari, 2017-2018 yazarlarinin arastirma makalelerinin ozetlerinde, diger arastirmacilarin fikirlerine atifta bulunduklari tanitlayicilari 2008-2009 yazarlarina gore daha fazla kullandiklarini ve boylece okuyuculara metin boyunca daha cok rehberlik ettiklerini gostermektedir. Bu sonuc, yazar-okuyucu iliskisi derecesinin toplumsal iliskiler acisindan art zamanli evrimini ortaya koymaktadir, soyle ki 2017-2018 yazarlari belirli bir soylem toplulugunun uyesi olduklarini tanitlayici kullanimiyla daha fazla beyan etme egilimindedir. Bu arastirmanin, Turk akademik soyleminin art zamanli bir bakis acisiyla daha iyi anlasilmasina katki saglamasi ve yabanci dil ogretimi, butunce dil bilimi ve metin cozumlemesi gibi alanlarda faydali sonuclar saglamasi beklenmektedir.

A Contrastive Study of Theme Types and Patterns in Medical Research Article Abstracts Written in English by Native and Saudi Scholars

Abstracts of research articles are dense in nature and require authors to pack information in a concise cohesive paragraph. One principle of cohesion is employing various theme types and thematic progression patterns. The study conducted qualitative contrastive analyses of these aspects in medical research article (RA) abstracts written in English by native and Saudi scholars. The findings revealed the predominance of constant and linear thematic progression patterns. Whereas the two patterns are almost equally used in the native scholars’ data, the constant pattern prevailed in the non-native scholars’ data. Non-native authors tended to simplify complex subject matter by using shorter clauses to exert less effort in processing them. They also relied on cohesive ties to achieve cohesion rather than using various thematic progression patterns. Due to the factual nature of the medical abstracts, unmarked topical and textual themes were the most used instead of interpersonal themes. Multiple themes were minimally employed due to the generic features of abstracts. The study findings may have implications for novice RA scholars of medicine, English for specific purpose instructors, and researchers interested in both second language acquisition and cross-cultural variations. Future studies could investigate themes in medical RA abstracts written in other languages.

The The Paratactic and Hypotactic Constructions in Research Article Abstracts at 2018 ISET Proceedings

The present study was a part of larger research aimed at analysing the research article abstracts taken from International Conference on Science and Education and Technology 2018 (ISET 2018). This study was descriptive study under SFL analysis in research article abstracts at 2018 ISET realized from 170 clause complexes. Under a SFL theory, the data were collected through retrieving twenty relevant article abstracts on the International Conference on Science and Education and Technology 2018 (ISET 2018). The article abstracts are analysed using the framewok of systemic functional linguistic as suggested by Halliday & Matthiessen (2014). However, in this study the writer employs the taxis sytems which covers elaboration, extension, and enhancement. Besides, logico-semantic relation is also analysed which covers projection and expansion. The findings reveal that there are 81 clause complexes of parataxis which are realised 47%, afterwards, there are 35 clause complexes of hypotaxis which are realised 20.5%. Hence, the researchers is more using parataxis then hypotaxis. Bassed on the findings, it is recommended that English teacher can apply clause constructions to encourage the English learners to think critically. After being able to implement their critical thinking, the English learners are hoped to be able to read critically. Through having critical reading, they are suggested to be able to evaluate both their works and the other works as the main purpose in learning systemic functional linguistics.

Genre analysis of artificial intelligence research article abstracts:Local versus international journal

The generic structure of research article (RA) abstracts has been studied across disciplines and cultures. Taking a different approach, the current study aimed to explore and compare the constituent moves of RA abstracts in a local and an international journal in the field of Artificial Intelligence. To this end, Bhatia’s model of four-move abstracts was applied to 30 RA abstracts, 15 from the local and 15 from the international journal, published in 2017. The results revealed that the Methods and Results moves were obligatory in both local and international abstracts while the Conclusion move was absent in most RA abstracts in both local and international journals. The findings unfolded the obligatory nature of the Purpose move in international abstracts as well. The results can carry some pedagogical implications for academic writing instructors in order to enhance their applicants’ understanding of the generic norms of academic discourse communities.
 Keywords: Academic writing, artificial intelligence, genre analysis, moves, research article abstracts.

Relationship between persuasive metadiscoursal devices in research article abstracts and their attention on social media.

Research article abstracts often convince readers that the article is worth reading. Therefore, they rely not only on the quality of arguments or novelty of findings to persuade readers but also linguistic markers in the form of metadiscourse to assert a position on an issue, increase readability of a text, engage readers, and avoid objection to the writer’s interpretations, thereby enhancing the credibility of the text. Given that research article abstracts are often published online and their newsworthiness would affect whether they would be ultimately read, Altmetric.com, which emerged in 2010, can help quantify the popularity of research article abstracts by counting views on social media and other platforms such as news and policy documents. Yet a study on how metadiscoursal devices are used to persuade readers, and how they are correlated with Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) provided by Altmetric.com, merits attention. In our study, we examined 241 abstracts from 50 top journals in 12 disciplines with the highest AAS from 2014–2018 and performed a quantitative analysis of the interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers exhibited in the abstracts. Overall, we found a positive correlation between the use of metadiscourse and AAS. Furthermore, we noticed that each discipline used distinct metadiscourse markers in abstracts with high AAS, which contributed to its respective discipline-specific conventions. It has been previously shown that the use of an array of interactive and interactional metadiscourse renders the abstract more worthy of attention. Being knowledgeable of rhetorical choices in relation to metadiscoursal devices will enable writers to construct more persuasive abstracts by making informed judgments about the appropriate use of metadiscourse to draw the attention of readers in their respective disciplines.

Lexical bundle variation across moves in abstracts of medical research articles

The aim of this study was to explore lexical bundle use in four moves within abstracts of medical research articles (RAs) and to investigate the relation between bundles and moves. Lexical bundles were identified, and bundle structures and functions in each move were compared and analysed. Four-word bundles in medical RA abstracts were characterised by considerable overlap. The majority of lexical bundles were specific to only one move. There was no significant difference in bundle structures in types across moves, but there was a significant difference in tokens. There was a significant difference in bundle functions in both types and tokens. These differences may be attributable to the rhetorical functions of each move, which reflects a relation between lexical bundles and moves. These findings suggest caution in considering the bundle features of medical RA abstracts as a whole, since bundle variation across moves needs to be taken into consideration.

Move analysis of research article abstracts in the field of ELT: A comparative study

This study aims to make a comparison between research article abstracts written by two groups in the field of English Language Teaching (ELT) by Turkish scholars and non-Turkish scholars working in Anglophone countries to find the rhetorical structure they employ in their abstracts. To achieve this purpose, 390 research article abstracts, 195 abstracts from each group, were analyzed. To analyze the abstracts, Hyland’s (2000) model with five moves was employed. In addition to the descriptive statistics, the Chi-Square test was used to find whether there are any statistical differences between two writer groups in terms of move use. Results showed that there are no statistically significant differences in terms of moves between the two groups. However, three moves (purpose, method, product) frequently occurred in Turkish writers’ abstracts while foreign writers include four moves (purpose, method, product, conclusion) more commonly in their abstracts. These findings have some implications for researchers, particularly for developing teaching materials for academic writing courses that can guide scholars to successfully participate in the international discourse community.

Tracking Interpersonality in Research Article Abstract: A Diachronic Study of Dynamic Nature of Genre

This study reports on interpersonality in a diachronic-contrastive investigation in Research Article (RA) abstracts. The study analyzed a corpus of 180 RA abstracts from two journals of Psychological Bulletin and Personality and Individual Differences over the last three decades. This paper uses Hyland’s (2005b) Stance Model of Interaction and Hyland & Tse’s (2005) Classification of Sentences Containing Evaluative that in order to explore interpersonality. The results of this study revealed that authors of these journals adopted different stance and positioning over time in their writing. In addition, the findings of this paper did not corroborate previous research findings that RA abstracts exhibit high number of boosters. In relation to writing pedagogy, the results of this study can help the scholars to frame their papers in order to publish them in English-medium journals.

Corpus Analysis Of Reporting Verbs In Abstracts To Research Articles

The authors of this article employ the methods of corpus linguistics to study the semantics of general scientific verbs of the lexical-semantic group of reporting in order to study the semantic organization and thematic ordering of this group of English-language predicates in abstracts. The categorical taxonomic meaning of reporting verbs provides an appropriate perception of information when compressing the main text of a research article. Studies that exist in this area comprise the analyses of the rhetorical structure or linguo-cognitive organization of research articles abstracts in various subject areas. Paradigmatics and syntagmatics of lexical units in general and predicates in particular remain not fully understood within the framework of abstracts. Consequently, the relevance of the subject of the study, namely verbs of reporting in abstracts, is due to the objective need to perform the communicative task of creating or translating a research article abstract mainly from Russian into English. At the same time, the non-English academic community needs access to authentic research, the understanding of which occurs mainly basing on proposition predicates. Based on the material of the сompiled corpus of 500 research article abstracts in the subject field of linguistics, the use of automated quantitative and qualitative methods of corpus analysis makes the selection of predicates and forms the lexical-semantic group of reporting with the semantic dominant to show, which reveals the highest frequency of use in abstracts. Along with the nuclear semantics to show, the semes: emergence of knowledge; confirmation of knowledge; clarification of knowledge; accentuation of knowledge; overview of knowledge, organize the space of the lexical-semantic group of reporting and, therefore, the texts of abstracts. Syntagmatics of the studied verbs is limited to four types of combination models of a verb and a direct object; a verb and a prepositional object; a verb and a subordinate clause; as well as a verb and an infinitive, where the first model is most frequent and the last one is least frequent.

The thematic structure in research article abstracts: Variations across disciplines

This study has investigated the thematic structure of RA abstracts published in business administration, applied linguistics, accounting, physics, chemistry, and computer science disciplines from t...

Rhetorical Move Structure in Abstracts of Research Articles Published in Ecuadorian and American English-Speaking Contexts

Rhetorical Move Structure in Abstracts of Research Articles Published in Ecuadorian and American English-Speaking Contexts

A Contrastive Analysis of the Rhetorical Moves of Applied Linguistics English Research Article Abstracts

대조수사학 연구는 문화적, 수사학적 특징을 이해하기 위해 서로 다른 언어의 담화 구조를 분석하는 것이다. 본 연구는 장르분석이론을 기반으로 영어논문초록의 수사학적 구조를 분석하였다. 응용언어학 분야의 국내학술지(Korean Journal of Applied Linguistics) 영어논문초록 30편과 국제학술지(Applied Linguistics) 영어논문초록 30편을 Hyland(2004)의 분석표 기준으로 분석하였다. 자료 분석은 내용을 중심으로 분석하는 상향식접근법(content of the text)과 특정어휘중심으로 분석하는 하향식접근법(typical lexical and grammatical signals)을 사용하였다 (Pho, 2008). 장르분석 결과 영어논문초록은 Move-2-3-4(Purpose-Method-Result) 수사구조를 상당부분 포함하고 있었고, 연구의 중요성(Move-1)과 연구결과기여도(Move-5)의 수사구조 중요성이 높아지고 있음을 알 수 있었다. 특히, 국내학술지 영어논문초록 경우에는 연구의 필요성과 영어교육현장에서 실제적인 교육학적 시사점이 강조된 반면, 국제학술지 영어논문초록 경우는 Swales의 CARS모형 (creating a research space)적용과 연구기여도(research contribution)를 강조하고 있다. 대조수사학기반 장르분석은 학문적 텍스트의 구조적, 수사학적 특징을 이해하고 학술목적(EAP) 논문쓰기교육을 위한 기초 자료를 제공할 수 있을 것이다.

Rhetorical Move Structure in Abstracts of Research Articles Published in Ecuadorian and American English-Speaking Contexts

Rhetorical Move Structure in Abstracts of Research Articles Published in Ecuadorian and American English-Speaking Contexts

Academic Words in the English Research Article Abstracts: the Coverage and Frequency

The present study aimed at exploring the abstracts of research articles written by non-native English researchers to uncover the specific characteristics of academic vocabulary employed in the English research articles abstracts.It focuses on frequency and coverage distribution of the words from the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000) in the abstracts of research articles. The source of data for this corpus study was gathered from 97 abstracts written by the EFL researchers and published by the Journal Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan Missio at STKIP St. Paulus Ruteng from 2015 until 2018. The results of this study revealed that the coverage of K1, the first most frequent 1000 English words, is the most dominant lexical items applied by the researchers. It covered 71.33% of the texts. The representation of lexical items that belong to K2, the second most frequent 1000 English words, covered 5.44% of all the words used by the writers in their abstracts. Moreover, the presence of Academic Word List, which refers to a list of 570 word families that are commonly found in academic texts and Off-list, which refers to the words that do not belong to K1 or K2 because it is related to certain field, has slight difference over all of the texts where the former covers 11.95% and the later covers 11.26%. As far as the findings of the present study are concerned, the room for some improvements on academic words applied in the abstracts need to pay attention.

Суперструктура научной аннотации: универсальное и культурно-специфическое (на материале английского, немецкого и русского языков)

Суперструктура научной аннотации: универсальное и культурно-специфическое (на материале английского, немецкого и русского языков)

Comparing Rhetorical Structure of Research Article Abstracts Written by Native English Writers and Chinese Writers

Comparing Rhetorical Structure of Research Article Abstracts Written by Native English Writers and Chinese Writers

REFERENCA KAO SREDSTVO GRAMATIČKE KOHEZIJE U APSTRAKTIMA NA ENGLESKOM I SRPSKOM JEZIKU

Along with the title, the abstract is a part of the research article that readers first encounter when they want to read a particular article as it provides the most important information related to the article itself. The appealing character of an abstract depends mostly on its content and the way it has been written. This article compares the use of reference as part of grammatical cohesion in mechanical engineering and social science abstracts in English and Serbian. Three types of reference have been analysed, namely personal, demonstrative and comparative in the corpus comprising 25 research article abstracts for each discipline and each language. More frequent use of reference, primarily demonstrative, in the English abstracts implies that their authors use those structures not only to achieve better textual cohesion and density of expression, but also to guide their readers through the text. Especially, the combination of demonstratives and the definite article with general and other nouns leads to the interlacing of lexical and grammatical cohesion, thus providing a wider range of expressions, argumentation and generalization. Unlike the English abstracts, the mechanical abstracts in Serbian rely more on lexical cohesion, with very few personal pronouns as cohesive devices. The awareness of such differences can be an important guideline to all researchers attempting to write for international readership.

Genre Analysis of Research Article Abstracts in Linguistics and Literature: A Cross Disciplinary Study

The importance of an abstract in a research article has turned the focus of linguistics on Genre analysis of abstract articles. Taking into consideration this immensely researched topic, this paper aims to investigate the macro and micro structures in the Linguistics and Literature Abstracts. In the previous researches, this very comparison is never addressed by the researches, hence the present research aims to fill this gap. The corpus contained 40 abstracts, 20 of linguistics and 20 of literature from International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature (IJALEL). The macro analysis was made according to the Create a Research Space (CARS) model by Swales (2004) and Ant mover software was used to analyze the corpus, while the micro analysis followed Swales and Feak (2009). The results showed that there is no significant difference between the linguistics and literature abstracts at the macro level while the differences lie at the micro level. This study will be beneficial for the novice researchers as it provides a framework of analyzing two interconnected disciplines.

Research Article Abstracts as a Tool for Disseminating Knowledge in Online Legal Publications

In the course of the last few decades web-based communication has facilitated the dissemination of scientific knowledge and has contributed to making material which was primarily targeted to the expert community also available to the wider public. For such a mass of information to be effectively comprehended, some changes became necessary in order to facilitate web-searches and locate relevant material when browsing online archives. In the light of the above, the genre of research article (RA) abstracts in online academic publications seems to be particularly interesting, since its distinctive generic function is to both attract the readers’ attention and synthetically anticipate the content of the ensuing RA. This paper compares abstracts in print issues and those available in electronic format of the Washington Law Review to see whether and to what extent the concern for piquing readers’ curiosity to continue reading the associated RA has affected abstract writing. The focus will be placed particularly on knowledge dissemination (KD) resources such as the labels used to refer to the associated RA, the verbs employed to describe the type of scientific activity performed by the RA and, finally, the metadiscursive markers (namely frame and endophoric markers) used to provide interpretive guidance to readers.

A Move-marker List: A Study of Rhetorical Move-lexis Linguistic Realizations of Research Article Abstracts in Social and Behavioural Sciences

While a wealth of research is available on the frequent multi-word units in academic genres, studies that exclusively link lexical sequences to the rhetorical moves in research articles (RAs) are fairly limited. This study involved compiling a corpus of 8,500 RA abstracts sampled from five disciplines of economics, law, political sciences, psychology, and sociology in social and behavioural sciences. Three to nine-word ngrams were generated using AntConc 3.4.4, which is a freeware corpus analysis toolkit. All the ngrams were studied in their contexts through concordance analysis and classified based on the rhetorical moves in which they occurred using the move structure taxonomy suggested by Hatzitheodorou (2014). Eventually, ngrams were processed at multiple levels and synthesized into 84 move-marker structures. This study offers insights into the linguistic realizations of moves in RA abstracts and introduces the concept of move-marker structures. In so doing, the potentials of positionally variable move-marker structures in improving English for Academic Purposes (EAP)/English for Specific Purposes (ESP) learners’ phraseological competence are suggested.