Abstract

CARCAMO MORALES, Benjamín. Rhetorical organization and self-reference in the Linguistics abstract: An English-Spanish contrastive study. Leng. [online]. 2019, vol.47, n.2, pp.334-357. ISSN 0120-3479.  https://doi.org/10.25100/lenguaje.v47i2.6748.

Abstracts have become a genre of interest due to the increasing importance of disseminating academic and scientific knowledge. The present study contrasts the rhetorical organization of abstracts written in English and Spanish published in Linguistics journals. The corpus consists of 60 abstracts, 30 of each language, extracted from six specialized Linguistics journals indexed in SciELO (3 journals published in Spanish) and SCOPUS (3 journals published in English). The corpus analysis followed a top-down approach. The results show that abstracts in Spanish tend to include fewer moves than those in English. Furthermore, impersonal self-reference is prevalent in both sets of abstracts. A difference found in this regard is that authors in English use the first person plural in the ‘purpose’ move more often. From the results, it can be stated that cultural variation influences the conventions of discourse communities.

Keywords : research articles; rhetorical moves; intercultural rhetoric; abstract; self-reference.

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