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Part of
Intercultural Perspectives on Research Writing
Edited by Pilar Mur-Dueñas and Jolanta Šinkūnienė
[AILA Applied Linguistics Series 18] 2018
► pp. 105–127

Chapter 5
Asserting research status, values and relevance in thesis abstracts of Science and Engineering

| Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
| Johor Bahru, Malaysia

This study examines the use of evaluation in thesis abstracts written by Malaysian novice research writers from Science and Engineering fields. Different linguistic features performing three different functions of evaluation were identified and categorised into status, value and relevance. Lexico-grammatical analysis has shown variations in terms of the overall preferences for status over value and relevance in the two fields. Science writers were more inclined to include status markers expressing certainty while summarising their research findings in the Product section of abstracts whereas Engineering writers appeared less assertive. Results from this study offer L2 research writers insights into specific linguistic choices to be made for writing efficient and persuasive research abstracts.

Keywords: abstracts, novice research writers, second language writers, Science and Engineering discourse
Article outline
  • 1.Abstracts and promotional features
  • 2.Theoretical orientation
  • 3.Corpus description
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.Findings
    • Distribution of evaluation functions
    • Evaluation functions per section in thesis abstract
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aals.18.05meh
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