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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. 151–171

Chapter 7
Conference abstracts in English

A challenge for non-Anglophone writers

| Masaryk University

With the growing internationalisation of all scholarship the use of English as an international lingua franca has become an important prerequisite for scholars who intend to submit their abstracts and present their research to an academic audience at international conferences. Consequently, scholars from non-Anglophone backgrounds have to master the writing of this research-process genre (Swales, 1990) in English, since otherwise they may risk being refused participation at conferences and publication in conference proceedings. This chapter analyses the textual organisation of conference abstracts (CAs) written in English with the aim of finding out whether there is intercultural variation in rhetorical moves and their linguistic realisations applied by Anglophone scholars and those from some countries where Slavonic languages are spoken.

Keywords: intercultural variation, conference abstracts, rhetorical structure, moves, move analysis, tense, aspect and voice of finite verbs, classes of grammatical subjects
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus and methodology
    • 2.1Corpus
    • 2.2Methodology
  • 3.Findings and discussion
    • 3.1Macrostructure of CAs
    • 3.2Selected linguistic realisations of CAs
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgement
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aals.18.07pov
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