Contrasting the rhetoric of abstracts in medical discourse: Implications and applications for English/Spanish translation

Producción CientíficaThe present study aims at offering a contrastive analysis framework for the specific textual patterns of the expert-to-expert communicative setting from a semantic and a functional approach. Our methodology tries to identify patterns of behaviour in one of the genres that might be said to be exclusive of expert-to-expert discourse in medicine: abstracts. By means of describing regularities, differences in the way information is distributed will be pinpointed. Since textual realizations have been agreed to bridge the distance between the semantic and the functional component, cohesion will be analyzed both as a semantic marker and as an indicator of information distribution — pragmatic marker — according to functional constraints. ‘Ad hoc’ comparable and translation corpora have been built, extracted from medical journals with a significant impact. Intra and interlingual analysis of those corpora has been carried out to attain a comprehensive description of textual patterns from the above mentioned semantic, formal and functional parametrical levels.Junta de Castilla y León (2005–2007) - Project (UEMC01A05)Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (HUM2005-01215

Análisis contrastivo inglés-ruso de resúmenes de artículos de investigación del ámbito de geociencias

Un buen dominio del género textual del Resumen resulta fundamental para satisfacer las expectativas de la comunidad científica. Hasta la fecha ya contamos con diferentes investigaciones sobre este género en diversas disciplinas, si bien el Resumen en el ámbito de geociencias ha sido menos estudiado. Por otro lado, el enfoque adoptado en la mayoría de esos estudios se basa en las dicotomías nativo/no nativo. No obstante, el análisis de los resúmenes escritos por rusohablantes todavía presenta un campo de investigación poco explorado. El presente trabajo tiene por objetivo llevar a cabo una comparación lingüística de resúmenes escritos en inglés por geocientíficos noveles rusos, por un lado, y por expertos ingleses nativos, por el otro. Para ello se ha recopilado un corpus de resúmenes geocientíficos en inglés. El análisis multidimensional del corpus generalmente confirma los estudios previos sobre el tema, sin embargo, ha mostrado unas características diferentes en los resúmenes rusos.Mastering the genre of the research article abstract is crucially important to meet the expectations of a discourse community in a particular scientific field. To date, research has shed light on how abstracts are written in various disciplines. However, few if any attempts have been made to analyse the abstract in geoscience. Furthermore, several studies have investigated the genre of abstract drawing on native/non-native, expert/apprentice dichotomies. Even so, there has not been sufficient investigation into abstracts written by Russian native speakers. This study therefore aims to carry out a cross-linguistic comparison of abstracts written in English by Russian novice researchers and native English-speaking experts in geoscience. For this purpose, a monolingual English corpus of research articles in geoscience was created. The results of Biber’s multidimensional analysis generally confirm previous findings about abstracts in hard sciences, though they allow for hypotheses on some distinctive features of abstracts written by Russian geoscientists

Argumentative zoning information extraction from scientific text

Let me tell you, writing a thesis is not always a barrel of laughs—and strange things can happen, too. For example, at the height of my thesis paranoia, I had a re-current dream in which my cat Amy gave me detailed advice on how to restructure the thesis chapters, which was awfully nice of her. But I also had a lot of human help throughout this time, whether things were going fine or beserk. Most of all, I want to thank Marc Moens: I could not have had a better or more knowledgable supervisor. He always took time for me, however busy he might have been, reading chapters thoroughly in two days. He both had the calmness of mind to give me lots of freedom in research, and the right judgement to guide me away, tactfully but determinedly, from the occasional catastrophe or other waiting along the way. He was great fun to work with and also became a good friend. My work has profitted from the interdisciplinary, interactive and enlightened atmosphere at the Human Communication Centre and the Centre for Cognitive Science (which is now called something else). The Language Technology Group was a great place to work in, as my research was grounded in practical applications develope

Exploring Abstract Writing in the EFL Undergraduate Theses: A Construction-based Analysis

An abstract is considered a miniature of a whole series of scientific works. The contents of each chapter in the entire scientific result must be represented in an abstract. However, various abstracts have different structures from one another. Thus, writers of scientific papers have a choice with the appropriate abstract form, but at the same time, they also have problems choosing which structure to use. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the designs of abstract writing from the EFL undergraduate students who different academic advisors guide. A qualitative method with content analysis was employed in this study by examining students' scientific work under the guidance of other supervisors in the form of theses with a focus on the abstract part. As a result of the research, it has been identified that most abstracts employed informative type and structured format with different compositions. In addition, the research results would contribute to the description of the abstract structure utilized by the students as the object of this research. Based on these findings, it can be suggested that understanding abstract construction can be employed by introducing different types of abstract and their format in academic writing courses or research methodology. The lecturer can apply the strategy of compiling leading questions for each abstract type. Answering the leading questions has guided the flow of abstract writing ideas in a thesis. &nbsp

La estructura retórica del resumen (abstract) en las disciplinas arte y diseño : un estudio descriptivo

Maestría en Inglés con Orientación en Lingüística AplicadaAs an effective means of representing the research article, the abstract has increasingly become an essential part of this genre. For that reason, understanding the rhetorical conventions that govern abstract writing in their respective fields may help students and novice researchers acquire reading and writing skills in their fields of specialization. Recent research on the rhetorical features of abstracts has revealed broad patterns of regularity as well as disciplinary variation. Although several investigations have focused their analysis on a variety of disciplines, no study appears to have explored the rhetorical structure of abstracts in the fields of Art and Design. The present research, therefore, examines the rhetorical moves and main linguistic features of Art and Design abstracts, and proposes a schema for the abstract genre in each of these disciplinary domains. To conduct the study, a corpus of 30 abstracts from four high-impact journals was compiled, and subjected to a move analysis (Swales, 1981, 1990) using the analytical framework proposed by Pho (2008), and the methodology suggested by Dudley-Evans (1994) and Holmes (1997). The results reveal that although Art and Design abstracts bear some similarities, they also show some differences that result in distinct emerging patterns. Based on these findings, two models are proposed of the rhetorical elements that are constitutive of each discipline. The outcome of this research has pedagogical implications for students, novice researchers and teachers within ESP (English for Specific Purposes) contexts.Fil: Caturegli, Alicia. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina

RHETORICAL STRUCTURE OF PROMOTIONAL GENRES: THE CASE OF RESEARCH ARTICLE AND CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS

This paper focuses on the rhetorical structure of research article and conference abstracts in Linguistics. The study employs quantitative and qualitative analysis and is based on a self-compiled corpus of abstracts from two prestigious linguistic journals (Linguistics and The Journal of Linguistics) and conference abstracts from the 49 th Annual Meeting of the international society of linguists Societas Linguistica Europaea. The results show that the key moves (‘Background’, ‘Purpose’, ‘Methods’, ‘Results’) are distributed fairly similarly across the two types of abstracts; however, the ways they are employed are not always similar. Two additional moves were identified in our data set (‘Niche Opening’ and ‘Announcing Position’), which signal different promotional strategies employed by researchers

Humanitarinių mokslų straipsnių santraukų lietuvių, anglų ir rusų kalbomis retorinė struktūra ir kalbiniai ypatumai

Over the past few decades, research article abstracts have been receiving increased attention of scholars. While abstracts in English have been extensively researched, there are few studies on abstracts in Russian and no studies on abstracts in Lithuanian. This study investigates the rhetorical structure and linguistic features of research article abstracts across different humanities disciplines in Lithuanian, English and Russian. My aim is to detect similarities and differences in abstract structure and corresponding linguistic features within the three different academic writing traditions. I seek to answer the question which writing tradition, the Anglo-Saxon or the Continental, is closer to Lithuanian academic writing. This study employs contrastive qualitative and quantitative analysis and corpus-based methodology. The results highlight aspects of abstract writing that may be relevant for researchers while preparing abstracts of their research articles in these three languages.Pastaraisiais dešimtmečiais mokslininkai vis daugiau dėmesio skiria mokslinių straipsnių santraukoms. Mokslinių straipsnių santraukos anglų kalba yra daug ir išsamiai ištyrinėtos, tačiau vis dar mažai tyrimų, analizuojančių santraukas, parašytas kitomis kalbomis, o ypač trūksta kelių kalbų kontrastyvinių tyrimų. Mokslinių straipsnių rusų kalba santraukos yra mažai tyrinėtos, o lietuvių kalba – netyrinėtos. Šiame tyrime nagrinėjama skirtingų humanitarinių disciplinų mokslinių straipsnių santraukų retorinė struktūra lietuvių, anglų ir rusų kalbomis. Tyrimo tikslas – nustatyti penkių humanitarinių mokslų sričių mokslinių straipsnių santraukų pagrindinius struktūrinius ir kalbinius ypatumus žvelgiant į tris skirtingas akademinio rašymo tradicijas. Straipsnyje siekiama atsakyti į klausimą, kuri rašymo tradicija – anglosaksiška ar kontinentinė – yra artimesnė lietuvių akademiniam diskursui. Šio tyrimo metodika remiasi kontrastyvine analize ir tekstynų lingvistikos metodu. Tarpkalbinė analizė rodo, kad lietuviškos santraukos turi daugiau panašumų su rusiškomis santraukomis nei su angliškomis, todėl prieinama prie išvados, kad lietuvių retorikos tradicijos yra glaudžiau susijusios su kontinentine, o ne anglosaksiška rašymo tradicija. Tai matyti iš tam tikrų retorinių žingsnių, kurių dažnumas rusų ir lietuvių kalbų santraukose yra artimesnis, palyginti su angliškomis santraukomis. Be akivaizdžių skirtumų, yra nemažai tarpkalbinių panašumų, susijusių su tam tikrų žingsnių kalbine realizacija. Kontrastyvinė analizė išryškina struktūrinius ir kalbinius santraukų rašymo aspektus, kurie gali būti aktualūs mokslininkams, rengiantiems savo mokslinių straipsnių santraukas šiomis trimis kalbomis, taip pat pradedantiesiems tyrėjams ir studentams, siekiantiems įsisavinti šio kompaktiško, bet labai svarbaus žanro struktūrą ir jam būdingus kalbinius ypatumus. Rezultatai taip pat gali būti naudingi vertėjams, kurie galėtų pateikti autoriams patarimų dėl tarpkultūrinių akademinio teksto kūrimo skirtumų