English-Russian cross-linguistic comparison of research article abstracts in geoscience

Belyakova, M. Yu.

doi:10.14198/elua2017.31.02

Cited by 10 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Hedging in academic prose has been exhaustively investigated from conceptually different perspectives (Aull & Lancaster, 2014;Azar & Hashim, 2022;Belyakova, 2017;Gillaerts & van de Velde, 2010;Hu & Cao, 2011;Kozubíková Šandová, 2021;Lenardič & Fišer, 2021;Takimoto, 2015;Vassileva, 2001;Varttala, 2001). Previous studies have revealed that there are significant differences in the employment of hedging devices in RA abstracts across disciplines, cultures and time spans (Gillaerts & van de Velde, 2010;Hu & Cao, 2011;Khedri et al, 2015;Kozubíková Šandová, 2021).…”

Section: Hedging In Research Article Abstractsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hedging is an interesting element of academic writing pragmatically functioning as metadiscourse used to present claims with various degrees of tentativeness and to enter into a dialogue with readers. The employment of hedges in academic discourse has been examined in a large number of works, including those whose results have found applications in style manuals (Al-Khasawneh, 2017;Alonso Almeida, 2014;Alward et al, 2012;Aull & Lancaster, 2014;Belyakova, 2017;Gillaerts & van de Velde, 2010;Haufiku & Kangira, 2018;Hu & Cao, 2011;Hyland, 2005cHyland, , 2018Khedri et al, 2015;Kozubíková Šandová, 2021;Lenardič & Fišer, 2021;Lores Sanz, 2006;Lorés Sanz et al, 2010;Martín, 2003;Petchkij, 2019;Vassileva, 2001). However, as Crystal (1995, p. 117) put it, hedging is "a huge meadow of research", and knowledge of this metadiscourse resource can improve our understanding of how scholars work.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A diachronic analysis of hedging in non-native authors’ research article abstracts

Boginskaya

2022

CLR

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A growing part of studies on English for academic purpose explores how English is used in non-Anglophone contexts. This article focuses on the under-researched context of Russia, where English has been used as a language of scientific publications only since 2010. The paper explores hedging devices in Russian authors’ research article abstracts from a diachronic perspective. The main focus is on quantitative and qualitative variations in the use of these linguistic means. It is assumed their distribution could change over time. Exploring functions of hedges and suggesting reasons for diachronic changes in their use are other research questions. The weakening intrusion of national Russian criteria of good writing and greater awareness of English academic norms due to the need to publish internationally have influenced hedging patterns in Russian authors’ research article abstracts. The study is based on a corpus of 120 research article abstracts from the field of linguistics published in two Russian journals in 2010-2020. The theoretical framework followed here is Hyland’s (2000) taxonomy of hedges, which offers a pragmatically-grounded method for analyzing hedging in academic discourse

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Section: Hedging In Research Article Abstractsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A diachronic analysis of hedging in non-native authors’ research article abstracts

Boginskaya

2022

CLR

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“…Unlike these studies, which focused exclusively on the rhetorical organisation of RA abstracts of distinct disciplines, other studies examined other sources of variation, while focusing on specific disciplines. In particular, some studies have examined how abstracts of specific disciplines differ across languages (Belyakova, 2017;Marefat & Mohammadzadeh, 2013) Belyakova (2017) examined abstracts written by Russian novice researchers and English-speaking experts in Geoscience. Juan and Tao (2013) also compared medical abstracts across English and Chinese and found that Move 1 (research background) was nearly absent in the abstracts written by Chinese writers.…”

Section: Move Structure Of Ra Abstractsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Others have examined the linguistic features that characterise RA abstracts (Gillaerts, 2014;Kuhi & Mousavi, 2015). Essentially, previous research on RA abstracts has focused, among other things, on intra/cross-disciplinary, cross-linguistic, and cross-cultural variations (e.g., Al-Khasawneh, 2017; Belyakova, 2017;Dong & Xue, 2010;Ji, 2015;Marefat & Mohammadzadeh, 2013), using a corpus comprising abstracts from different journals. This has created a knowledge gap on the rhetorical organisation and linguistic features of abstracts of individual journals.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Genre Analysis of Abstracts of Empirical Research Articles Published in TESOL Quarterly

Agbaglo

Fiadzomor

2021

JELTAL

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Research article (RA) abstracts constitute an important genre in higher education. Previous research on the RA abstract has often combined abstracts from journals from the same discipline, with the view of revealing possible intra/inter-disciplinary, cross-linguistic, cross-cultural, etc. variations. The present study analysed empirical RA abstracts from TESOL Quarterly, a well-recognised journal in Applied Linguistics, with the view of revealing their rhetorical structure and linguistic peculiarities. Hundred (100) empirical RA abstracts collected from the website of the journal constituted the data for the study. The data were analysed, with attention to the move structure (kinds, frequency, and sequencing of moves) as well as the linguistics realisation of moves. The study revealed that TESOL Quarterly empirical RA abstracts feature a five-move structure, with the Purpose and Product moves being Obligatory and the Introduction, Method, and Conclusion moves being core moves. It was also revealed that the abstracts were characterised by nine move sequences, with the five-move sequence (M1>M2>M3>M4>M5) dominating. The study also revealed that each move was characterised by unique configurations of linguistic features, particularly tense, voice, and grammatical subject roles. This study contributes to scholarship on RA abstracts. It also has implications for pedagogy and practice, and serves as a trigger for further studies.

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“…It was revealed that the existing variation reflects differences in the linguacultural and epistemological traditions of the Anglophone and Czech linguistics communities, which favor different rhetorical strategies when approaching writer-reader interaction. These studies conducted on English materials indicate the less intense use of hedges by non-native English writers (Belyakova 2017, Chen & Zhang 2017, Dontcheva-Navratilova 2016, Hu & Cao 2011, Ji 2015, Sládková 2017, Thuy 2018, Vassileva 2001, Yagiz & Demir 2014. At the same time, it has been found that different linguistic cultures use different functional categories to hedge in academic discourse: Vietnamese writers, for example, prefer modal verbs (Thuy 2018), while Iranian researchers often use adverbs, including approximators (Rezanejad 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional categories of hedges: A diachronic study of Russian research article abstracts

Boginskaya

2022

Russian Journal of Linguistics

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The interactional nature of academic discourse has been analyzed in linguistics literature from different perspectives. However, these studies have been predominantly conducted on English materials. Little is known of how interactional metadiscourse elements are used in Russian academic prose and what diachronic changes in metadiscourse have occurred in the last decade. Building on previous research that suggests cross-linguistic, cross-cultural and diachronic differences in the use of hedges in academic prose, this paper explores functional categories of hedges used in Russian research article abstracts from a diachronic perspective. The main focus is on quantitative and qualitative variations in the functional realization of hedging, since it may be expected that it could change over time. The study was conducted on a corpus of 112 linguistics research article abstracts published in four Russian journals in two periods (2008-2014 and 2015-2021). To investigate hedging devices and their functional categories, this study employed quantitative and qualitative analyses. The quantitative analysis indicated that in the first period (2008-2014) hedging was most frequently realized through modals, reporting verbs, and quantifiers. In the second time span (2015-2021), reporting verbs, epistemic verbs, and adjectives of probability were among the most frequent functional categories of hedging. Overall, the distribution of functional categories of hedging changed in the second period when hedging was realized through a variety of lexical means belonging to different functional categories. In terms of the functions of hedging, the difference was also striking. In the first time span, hedges were employed to diminish an authorial presence in the text, while in the second one authors hedged to point toward possible methodological limitations and to signal inaccuracies of research results. Despite some data limitations, this study could be seen as a starting point for future research of metadiscourse in Russian-language academic prose from cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural or diachronic perspective.

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English-Russian cross-linguistic comparison of research article abstracts in geoscience

Cited by 10 publications

References 25 publications

A diachronic analysis of hedging in non-native authors’ research article abstracts

A diachronic analysis of hedging in non-native authors’ research article abstracts

Genre Analysis of Abstracts of Empirical Research Articles Published in TESOL Quarterly

Functional categories of hedges: A diachronic study of Russian research article abstracts

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