Rhetorical Structures of Research Article Abstracts: a Preliminary Proposal of the Auto-featural Model

Abstract

Writing an abstract of a research article in English is a must among the current academic communities. Unfortunately, for the non-native speakers of English, structuring their abstract is not an easy task. In a number of textbooks on abstract writing, it has been traditionally recommended to write an abstract as a miniature of the full research paper. Recent empirical findings, however, suggest that more than mere summarizing takes place. This paper proposes a new analytic scheme for various rhetorical structures of abstracts in research articles. The proposed model comprises earlier models such as IMRD and CARS(Swqles 1990,2004), and allows a descriptively precise analysis, by which we could explore some possible features rather difficult to be explained in the previous research. The proposed model, however, is a preliminary version. Thus, this model has to ve refined through a further empirical research.