LINGUISTIC PROPERTIES OF PAKISTANI RESEARCH ARTICLE (RA) ABSTRACTS FROM MULTIPLE DISCIPLINES

Abstract

Research Articles (RAs) are vital for disseminating the scientific knowledge among the discourse community. RA abstracts are what first meet the eye of the reader after the title and thus helps the reader in deciding whether or not the article needs further reading. The growing importance of RA abstracts has motivated the current quantitative research where the researchers have tried to explore the linguistic features of Pakistani RA abstracts. The research has set out to explore the distribution of linguistic features across disciplines and across functional moves. For the said purpose, 100 RA abstracts; 50 from hard sciences (zoology, chemistry, physics, etc.) and 50 from soft sciences (IR, Linguistics, sociology, etc.), have been collected. Functional moves have been tagged through AntMover software and the linguistic features are explored through Multidimensional Analysis Tagger (MAT) v.1.1 which has tagged the parts of speech (POS) in the whole corpus. The results revealed that purpose move can be taken as conventional in both the disciplines while results move is conventional only in hard sciences. All other moves, (e.g. methodology, results, conclusion) are considered optional because they do not occur as frequently as purpose and results move. With regards to linguistic features, the results showed that linguistic choices are discipline as well as function dependent and they vary markedly across disciplines as well as across functional moves. The findings of this research have clarified the appropriate academic style of abstracts in research journals. The study also helps to form a pedagogical template practically useful for novice Pakistani RA writers to meet the rigorous demands by Pakistani research journals