Cross-disciplinary use of Organizational Linkers in Research Article Abstracts

This study focuses on realizations and discourse functions of the organizational linkers in the writing of research article abstracts from four disciplines. To this end, 120 research article abstracts from four disciplines namely, Applied Linguistics, Economics, Agriculture, and Applied Physics (30 from each discipline) were selected. All research article abstracts were extracted from empirical research articles published in international high impact journals. The corpus was analyzed adopting Gosden (1992) taxonomy. The most striking result is that the realizations and discourse functions of the organizational linkers, to a large extent, are guided by the nature of research article abstract and discipline. This result adds substantially to the comparative understanding of research article abstract writing across disciplines and evidences the need to tailor writing according to English for specific needs.