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The paper examines comparatively and diachronically the generic structure of research article abstracts written in English for international scientific journals and abstracts written in Italian and published in Italian journals in the field of linguistics, with the aim of exploring generic and cross-linguistic variation over the last 20 years. The data consist of two small corpora of English and Italian linguistics research article abstracts spaced at ten-year intervals, namely 1997, 2007 and 2017. The analysis shows that the generic structure and rhetorical organisation of abstracts written in Italian conforms to the international conventions based on the norms of the English academic discourse community. However, they are rhetorically less complex than English abstracts. Diachronic variation has also been observed in the frequency and distribution of every single move across the two language corpora over the decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by the scanty of works on background information of abstracts, this article analyses the discourse functions of mood choices in background information of arts-based research article abstracts. Background information segments of three hundred abstracts of arts-based research articles obtained from the internet and purposively selected were analysed using insights from the systemic functional linguistic tool of mood. Given the generic compliant function - based categorisation adopted, five kinds of indicative mood structures namely; mission indicative mood, premises setting, assumption indicative mood; justification and classification mood are found to characterise the data but premises setting mood choices which function to: (i) give historical background to the study; (ii) define concept(s) that are central to the study at hand; (iii) anchor or state the research objective(s) and (iv) build up arguments against existing (previous) studies with a view to establishing the justification for the current research are observed to be predominant in the data. This study concludes therefore that an understanding of mood choices and their generic compliant functions has potency of finding lasting solution to the problems being encountered by budding academics in writing their Background Information (BI). It equally serves as useful material for academic discourse pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Modality shifts mostly in value, followed by type and orientation in translation. • Original modal stance shifts to a stronger and more objectivised one in translation. • Modality shifts are largely contributed by loss of low-value implicit propositions. • Lexical, syntactic and textual factors affect modality shifts. Research on translation shifts, especially divergence in modality, that occur to English translations of Chinese research article abstracts is rare. The article aims to explore the linguistic changes in modality use, a linguistic device for expressing authors' evaluative judgement, in the abstracts of Chinese research articles and their English translations. By adopting a three-step analytical coding procedure from Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study analyses the cross-linguistic modality shifts in modal value, type and orientation in English translations of Chinese research article abstracts (RAAs) from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. It is found that 1) quantitatively, a considerable number of modality shifts have been observed in translated RAAs on value, followed by type and orientation, in which the distributions present a stronger and more objectivised stance resulting from a loss of modality on low-value implicit proposition; 2) qualitatively, Chinese-specific lexical, syntactic, and textual factors are associated with modality shifts, including lexical ambiguity, "run-on" sentences, and implicit information structure. The findings provide evidence of how original authorial modal stance is influenced by translators and integrated into academic discourse. The study also paves the way for future investigations of possible variables (e.g., the speech-written mode) in modality shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A generic analysis of research article abstracts can cover issues of different types; among them are linguistic features. An integral part of linguistic features of research article abstracts is interactive metadiscourse usage that can assist to make the text persuasive and unfolding to a discourse community. The main principle behind applying interactive metadiscourse is the view of writing as socially engaging; specifically, it indicates the ways writers project themselves into their arguments to declare their attitudes and commitments to the readers. This study aimed to explore how interactive metadiscourse markers are deployed by research article abstract writers belonging to different disciplinary communities within the soft sciences, while trying to reach the audience by creating a wellorganized discourse. Hyland's (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse was adopted to analyze 60 research article abstracts written in Applied Linguistics and Economics. Based on the results, there were marked variations found across the two disciplines in terms of interactive metadiscourse markers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to justify publication, the writers of scientific texts must create a research space that allows them to present new knowledge claims to the other members of the discourse community. This implies the use of a number of rhetorical strategies which involve the criticism of members of their own academic community. This article explores the interpersonal pragmatic phenomenon of academic criticism (AC) from a crosslinguistic perspective in research article abstracts. To this end, we have analyzed the various rhetorical options that writers may use to convey critical speech acts, in a corpus of 160 research paper abstracts written in English and Spanish in two disciplines (phonetics and psychology) of the social sciences. The results showed that the overall frequency of occurrence of instances of academic criticism is higher in the English abstracts, and that in the English texts, the writers preferred to convey criticism in an impersonal and indirect way, whereas in the Spanish texts, the writers opted more frequently for the use of personal and direct AC. The reason for this rhetorical variation is mainly explained by the influence of the sociopragmatic context of publication, that is, the relationship between the writers and the discourse community they are addressing, which is different both in terms of size and pressure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in the area of intercultural rhetoric has mainly focused on academic writing in English and other languages. However, the writing of research article abstracts in English and Arabic has yet received scarce attention. To this end, this study shows how academic writers interact with their readers in both English and Arabic, or how writers express their stance and engage with readers. Eighty abstracts of research articles in the field of social sciences (40 for each language)—published in two journals (Scopus Q4): Dirasat: Human and Social Sciences and the International Journal of Interdisciplinary Educational Studies —were retrieved for quantitative and qualitative analyses using Hyland's (2005, 2019) framework. The findings are discussed in light of theories of metadiscourse and intercultural rhetoric. The analysis revealed that there are clear differences in the way academic writers express their stance and engage with readers in the two languages. Specifically, the findings showed that Arabic academic writers made less use of hedges and more use of boosters and attitude markers than English academic writers. In addition, self-mention as a stance feature was totally absent in the English abstracts but was located eight times in the Arabic ones. Finally, Arabic academic writers made less use of the engagement markers than English academic writers. The findings call for more cross-linguistic and cross-cultural analyses of academic writing in general, and research articles in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The translation of research article rhetorical conventions is rarely researched. • We explored 3 corpora of article abstracts in 3 journals between 2006 and 2016. • Chinese and English article abstracts have different rhetorical moves. • Foreignization is the dominant strategy to mediate different rhetorical moves. • This may have negative impact on their reception in the international community. Research on mediating cross-cultural differences in rhetorical conventions of research article abstracts (RAAs) between such culturally distant languages as English and Chinese is rare. This article aims to explore the differences in rhetorical preferences between independently produced English and Chinese research article abstracts and the strategies used in translating Chinese RAAs into English. RAAs published in three journals between 2006 and 2016 were selected to form three corpora: corpus A consisting of 32 English RAAs, corpus B made up of 38 Chinese RAAs, and corpus C including 38 English RAAs which are translations of the RAAs in corpus B. Corpus A and B form a comparable corpus while corpus B and C constitute a parallel corpus. Results suggest that Chinese and English RAAs have different preferences in rhetorical move patterns because the rhetorical moves of Product and Method are much more frequent in English RAAs compared with their Chinese counterparts, and that rhetorical foreignization is the dominant strategy in translating Chinese RAAs into English. Possible reasons of such rhetorical differences and the impact of this resistant strategy on the reception of the translated RAAs in the international community is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]