English-Russian cross-linguistic comparison of research article abstracts in geoscience

Abstract

Mastering the genre of the research article abstract is crucially important to meet the expectations of a discourse community in a particular scientific field. To date, research has shed light on how abstracts are written in various disciplines. However, few if any attempts have been made to analyse the abstract in geoscience. Furthermore, several studies have investigated the genre of abstract drawing on native/non-native, expert/apprentice dichotomies. Even so, there has not been sufficient investigation into abstracts written by Russian native speakers. This study therefore aims to carry out a cross-linguistic comparison of abstracts written in English by Russian novice researchers and native English-speaking experts in geoscience. For this purpose, a monolingual English corpus of research articles in geoscience was created. The results of Biber’s multidimensional analysis generally confirm previous findings about abstracts in hard sciences, though they allow for hypotheses on some distinctive features of abstracts written by Russian geoscientists.