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- Title
RHETORICAL STRUCTURE OF RESEARCH MEDICAL ARTICLE ABSTRACTS - BULGARIAN-ENGLISH CONTRASTIVE STUDY.
- Authors
Dagnev, Ivaylo; Saykova, Mariya; Yaneva, Maya
- Abstract
From the perspective of the readership of a research medical article "the abstract is the first textual part with which the reader faces the title". Therefore, its communicative function is enormous, as it serves largely as a reference to the information value of the article. According to Hyland, the abstract is a "critical point" which, in a transcendent sense, tilts the scales in favor of reading or rejecting an article by the readers. In the world of discourse and genre analysis, abstracts are showered with considerable attention. Swales analyzes the rhetorical and textual organization of abstracts, followed by authors such as Martin, Hyland and Tse. A number of linguists in the field of discourse conduct contrastive analyzes of this genre by exploring it in different fields. With regard to the rhetorical structure of the abstract, it is, as expected, a reflection, or a mirror image, of the scientific paper itself. If we search deeper into the matter, the content of abstracts do not merely repeat the structure of the article itself, as the former depends on many other factors - mostly on the format required by journals’ editorial policies. All of them set a limit to the number of words, necessitating from authors specific structure and organization. The study presents a quantitative and qualitative analyses of the abstracts of research medical articles with regard to their rhetorical structure. It is based on a corpus of 186 abstracts of article in Bulgarian and 129 in English, all excerpted from prestigious high impact factor journals. Of those in Bulgarian, distinct parts have 123 abstracts, while the remaining 63 represent one separate paragraph. Of the abstracts in the English corpus in their turn, only 62 have clearly defined structured parts. The sequence of the moves in both corpora is firmly established with few exceptions. In abstracts with distinct parts, the predominant organization is: Introduction, Aim, Materials and Methods, Results, Conclusion. Analyzing the content of the abstracts, we found that they depend mostly on the format prescribed by the journals themselves. Not all abstracts have the abovementioned structure, and diversity is largely due to the different requirements that editorial policies stipulate. Many journals do not have a firmly established abstracts format (especially those that limit the number of words to 150-200) and there the authors have relative freedom of presentation of the articles’ content. The comprehensive analysis of the rhetorical movements of the abstracts suggests that their structure depends entirely on the conventions of the specific editions as well as on the perspective of the scientific discourse community.
- Subjects
BULGARIAN language; MEDICAL research; ENGLISH language; EDITORIAL policies; PARAGRAPHS
- Publication
Knowledge: International Journal, 2019, Vol 30, Issue 5, p1205
- ISSN
2545-4439
- Publication type
Article