ABSTRACT AS A GENRE OF ENGLISH ACADEMIC DISCOURSE: RHETORICAL STRUCTURE AND LINGUISTIC FEATURES

Abstract

Research article abstracts play a crucial role in academic communication, as they summarize research content and influence both editorial decisions and readers’ interest. The paper examines the abstract as a genre of English academic discourse using a comparative analysis of its rhetorical structure and linguistic features in philology journal articles. We have focused on abstracts published in Ukrainian Category A and Category B journals, which differ in terms of international visibility and academic prestige. The corpus includes 100 English-language research article abstracts selected from four philological journals, with an equal number (25 abstracts) representing each journal and each category (50 abstracts). The study employs a combination of descriptive, quantitative, and qualitative methods. The five-move rhetorical model was applied to identify the distribution of rhetorical moves. The linguistic analysis was simultaneously used to examine voice and tense patterns across the abstracts. Research findings show that abstracts of Category A journals have a more comprehensive and standardized rhetorical structure than those from Category B journals, particularly in the inclusion of methodological and concluding moves. Move 2 (Aim/Purpose) appears consistently across both categories, whereas the Conclusion/Suggestions move is the least frequent. The analysis of grammatical voice reveals a general preference for the active construction, particularly in the Introduction and Results/Findings sections, while the passive voice dominates in the Methods section. The analysis of tense usage shows that the Present Simple and Past Simple tenses are used most frequently, reflecting their functional roles in summarizing research aims and reporting results. The paper finds that rhetorical organization and linguistic choices are deeply connected in the abstracts. It therefore strongly suggests explicit instruction of both rhetorical and linguistic aspects in English for Academic Purposes classes aimed at novice Ukrainian researchers