Abstract:
The purpose of the present study is to analyse abstracts related to Applied Linguistics, and more precisely the discourse functions of grammatical subjects and verbs. The corpus consisted of 50 PhD thesis abstracts written on the subject of Applied Linguistics. All of the abstracts were written from 2010 to 2014. The theses from which the abstracts were extracted are available in the ProQuest database. Based on the model put forth by Swales and Feak (2004), the elements of the abstracts were identified. In accordance with Ebrahimi (2014), frameworks were used to analyse discourse functions, while the realisation of grammatical subjects and verbs was analysed for tense types. The results revealed that the “introducing part of study” and “research-related objects” were the predominant types of grammatical subjects. Indeed, these performed more discourse functions in Applied Linguistics PhD thesis abstracts compared with other grammatical subject types. The results also indicated that simple past tense was predominant in aim, method, and results sections, while the simple present was predominant in the background and conclusion sections.
Machine summary:
com Abstract The purpose of the present study is to analyse abstracts related to Applied Linguistics, and more precisely the discourse functions of grammatical subjects and verbs.
A number of research studies focussed on identifying the overall organisation of abstracts in specific disciplines or across disciplines (Santos, 1996; Martin, 2003; Hyland, 2004; Samraj, 2005; Cross and Oppenheim, 2006; Pho, 2008; Swales and Feak, 2009).
A number of researchers have focussed on the linguistic features of abstracts used in writing (Hyland and Tse, 2005; Pho, 2008; Golebiowski, 2009; Gillaerts and Van de Velde, 2010; Hu and Cao, 2011; Chan and Ebrahimi, 2012).
Thus, the present study aimed to investigate the types and discourse functions of grammatical subjects, as well as the verbs used in Applied Linguistics thesis abstracts.
Reviews of some of the studies focussed on abstracts are presented as follows: Lores (2004) analysed research article (RA) abstracts from linguistics journals, with a particular focus on two related angles: rhetorical organisation and thematic structure.
Discourse functions of GS types GS types Discourse Function {مراجعه شود به فایل جدول الحاقی} 2 Research-related objective defines the research-related objectives in the method section elaborates on the features of data, materials and objects states the result related to the research-related objective 3 Empty Theme postpones the important information to the predicative section of the main clause Introducing part of study As evidenced by Table 3, the introducing part of study GS (Example 1) was the predominant GS in the analysed thesis abstracts.