DISCURSIVE AND GRAMMATICAL FEATURES OF RESEARCH ARTICLE ABSTRACTS

Considering the fact that about 100,000 research and professional journals are published annually (Swales 1990), the abstract plays a significant role when members of academic discourse community are faced with the difficulty of finding specific data in lengthy research articles. Therefore, the abstract, as an independent genre, is of crucial importance, especially when potential readers have to decide whether to read a specific research article or not. This paper presents an analysis of research article abstracts in English written by academic writers. The analysis is based on 48 abstracts randomly taken from prominent British journals in three areas of political science: social, election and foreign policy. The focus is on their rhetorical structure, identified using Bhatia. s model (1993). The analysis goes further to outline the distinctive discursive and grammatical features of such patterns. More precisely, the aim of this paper is to provide an insight into the use of tenses in each move 4respectively as well as possible reasons for the stated. The results suggest that the Present Simple Tense is the most frequent, although Graetz (1985) emphasises that the Past Simple Tense is dominant in abstracts. As a conclusion, this paper may be of use in teaching the writing of research article abstracts as a genre of written discourse.