Genre Analysis of Research Article Abstracts in Linguistics and Literature: A Cross Disciplinary Study

Abstract

The importance of an abstract in a research article has turned the focus of linguistics on Genre analysis of abstract articles. Taking into consideration this immensely researched topic, this paper aims to investigate the macro and micro structures in the Linguistics and Literature Abstracts. In the previous researches, this very comparison is never addressed by the researches, hence the present research aims to fill this gap. The corpus contained 40 abstracts, 20 of linguistics and 20 of literature from International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature (IJALEL). The macro analysis was made according to the Create a Research Space (CARS) model by Swales (2004) and Ant mover software was used to analyze the corpus, while the micro analysis followed Swales and Feak (2009). The results showed that there is no significant difference between the linguistics and literature abstracts at the macro level while the differences lie at the micro level. This study will be beneficial for the novice researchers as it provides a framework of analyzing two interconnected disciplines.