Writing in and across Disciplines
DISCIPLINARY DIFFERENCES IN CONSTRUCTING COHESION AND COHERENCE IN RESEARCHPAPER ABSTRACTS
Eva Braidwood¹, Suzy McAnsh²
¹Languages and Communication, Extension School, University of Oulu, Finland ²Languages and Communication, Extension School, University of Oulu, Finland
Researchpaper abstracts are designed to convey a great deal of information in the space of a few lines. To comply with the appropriate word limit, researchers need to avoid wordiness and redundancy. This need for conciseness may restrict authors’ possibility to employ the typical devices used for composing a wellconnected, flowing text, and means that they may need to resort to other strategies to make their abstract both cohesive and coherent. Although some work has been carried out to investigate the factors contributing to cohesion and coherence (Hoey 1991, Tanskanen 2006) and cohesion in scientific abstracts in particular (Santos 1996, Afful & Nartey, 2014), further work is needed to explore this topic in abstract writing and to establish whether the devices used differ according to discipline. The present study aims to examine how cohesion and coherence are achieved in researchpaper abstracts in various fields within architecture and engineering. By analysing a corpus of abstracts recently published in highimpact journals in these disciplines, we survey how cohesion and coherence are created by tracing lexical, grammatical and rhetorical features in the texts. In our presentation, we demonstrate that different disciplines employ different textual devices to follow the conventions of their discipline. The findings of this study may support academicwriting teachers in designing more effective disciplinespecific instruction for students striving to meet the expectations of the gatekeepers to publication in the discourse community.
References
Afful, J.B.A. and Nartey, M. (2014) ‘Cohesion in the Abstracts of Undergraduate Dissertations: An Intradisciplinary Study in a Ghanaian University’. Journal of ELT and Applied Linguistics 2 (1), 93108
Hoey, M. (1991) Patterns of Lexis in Text . Oxford: Oxford University Press
Santos, M.B. (1996) ‘The textual organisation of research paper abstracts in applied linguistics’. Journal of Applied Linguistics 16 (4), 482499
Tanskanen, SK. (2006) Collaborating towards Coherence: Lexical Cohesion in English Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company