Changes in Research Abstracts: Past Tense, Third Person, Passive, and Negatives

IF 1.9 1区文学 Q2 COMMUNICATION

Written Communication Pub Date : 2022-11-28 DOI:10.1177/07410883221128876

F. Jiang, Ken Hyland

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引用次数: 3

Abstract

Research abstracts are an increasingly important aspect of research articles in all knowledge fields, summarizing the full article and encouraging readers to access it. Graetz suggests that four main features contribute to this purpose—the use of past tense, third person, passive, and the non-use of negatives, although this claim has never been confirmed. In this article, we set out to explore the extent to which these forms are used in the abstracts of four disciplines, the functions they perform and how their frequency has changed over the past 30 years. Drawing on a corpus of 6,000 abstracts taken from the top 10 journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we found high but decreasing frequencies of past tense and passives, an increasing number of third person forms, and more than one negation every two texts. We also noted a remarkable decrease of past tense and passives in the hard sciences and an increase in applied linguistics, with sociologists making greater use of negation. These results suggest that abstracts have developed a distinctive argumentative style, rhetorically linked both to their communicative function and to the changing social contexts in which academic writing is produced and consumed.

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研究摘要的变化:过去式、第三人称、被动语态和否定语态

在所有知识领域的研究文章中，研究摘要是一个越来越重要的方面，总结了全文并鼓励读者访问它。Graetz认为有四个主要特征有助于达到这一目的——使用过去式、第三人称、被动语态和不使用否定语态，尽管这一说法从未得到证实。在本文中，我们开始探索这些形式在四个学科摘要中的使用程度，它们的功能以及它们在过去30年中的频率变化情况。我们从四个学科在三个不同时期的十大期刊中提取了6000篇摘要，发现过去式和被动语态的频率很高，但在下降，第三人称形式的数量在增加，每两个文本中就有一个以上的否定。我们还注意到，硬科学中过去时和被动语态的使用显著减少，而应用语言学的使用有所增加，社会学家更多地使用否定。这些结果表明，摘要已经发展出一种独特的论证风格，修辞上既与它们的交际功能有关，也与学术写作产生和消费的不断变化的社会背景有关。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Written Communication COMMUNICATION-

CiteScore

3.90

自引率

15.80%

发文量

期刊介绍： Written Communication is an international multidisciplinary journal that publishes theory and research in writing from fields including anthropology, English, education, history, journalism, linguistics, psychology, and rhetoric. Among topics of interest are the nature of writing ability; the assessment of writing; the impact of technology on writing (and the impact of writing on technology); the social and political consequences of writing and writing instruction; nonacademic writing; literacy (including workplace and emergent literacy and the effects of classroom processes on literacy development); the social construction of knowledge; the nature of writing in disciplinary and professional domains.