Promotion-Oriented Steps in Research Article Abstracts in Chinese and International Journals: A Corpus-Based Comparative Study

Previous researches on abstracts have focused mainly on rhetorical moves, with little attention to detailed functions and genre features of steps.To fill in this gap, in this study, we investigated the promotion-oriented functions of steps on Situating the research and Discussing the research moves.Applying genre analysis and corpus linguistic method, we compared 1251 English abstracts of empirical articles published by Chinese and International leading journals.Results revealed that, on Situating the research move, writers of international journals were more competent in using dual promotion-oriented steps to highlight creativity of the research while their Chinese counterparts relied generally on "claims of centrality", a single promotion-oriented step function.In addition, on Discussing the research move, different from Chinese journal writers, international journal writers preferred steps of "dialogic" functions.The differences may indicate different orientations in boosting academic contributions between Chinese and international journal writers.The findings, hopefully, could draw greater attention on the part of Chinese scholars to the conventions of international academic communication.