Corpus Analysis of Genre Conventions in Russian and International Research Article Abstracts

Abstract

The paper aims at analyzing culture-specific differences in genre conventions of research article abstracts from Russian and international journals on Applied Linguistics. The study involves the use of various methods of corpus linguistics (such as frequency lists, key words type/token ratio, concordances, clusters, etc.) along with the cognitive approach to analyzing the rhetorical structure of the text. Variations over time are traced using longitudinal comparison.

The comparative analysis of the two corpora reveals differences between the abstracts in terms of their overall length (the total number of words and sentences), prevailing vocabulary (for total number of tokens and for academic words), dominant semantic fields and rhetorical structure. Specifically, Russian abstracts are shorter and their structure is simpler. The verbs in the initial sentence are broader in mean- ing and the academic lexis centers around the subject-matter of the article. In contrast, international abstracts are longer having a manifested rhetorical structure (Purpose – Methods – Results – Conclusions). The verbs in the initial sentence are more variable and their meaning is more specific, whereas the academic vocabulary tends to relate to the methods of study. By and large, the Russian abstracts can be classified as indicative, while the international abstracts as informative.

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