Corpus-Based Research on Tense Analysis and Rhetorical Structure in Journal Article Abstracts

There has long been a growing interest in journal articles (JA) abstract writing, and this pervading interest has boosted the exigency for further instructive research. This current study aims to investigate both the variant application of the verb tense as well as the rhetorical structure within JA abstracts. A 9.9 million word corpus of 1000 JAs was collected based on four prestigious journals, i.e., Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Research in Reading, Journal of Second Language Writing, and Reading and Writing, respectively. The quantitative analysis indicates the tendency of tense shown in the commonly applied reporting verbs. On the other hand, the qualitative analysis shows the prevailing adoption of three-, four-, and five-move theories in terms of the CARS model, the IMRD structure, and the IPMPrC structure. The results not only reveal the explicit tendency of the variance within reporting verbs but also suggest a distinct pervasiveness of the IMRD structure over the other models. These findings not only present a more systematic pattern within JA abstracts, but also show potentials for enlightening further pedagogy-oriented composition instruction for JA abstract.