Open AccessGenre-Specific Characteristics of the English Research Article: Analysis of the Content Macrostructure of the Results and Discussion Sections
Author(s) -
Elena V. Vakhterova
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
vestnik severnogo (arktičeskogo) federalʹnogo universiteta. seriâ «gumanitarnye i socialʹnye nauki»/vestnik severnogo (arktičeskogo) federalʹnogo universiteta. seriâ: "gumanitarnye i socialʹnye nauki"
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2687-1505
pISSN - 2227-6564
DOI - 10.37482/2687-1505-v168
Subject(s) - linguistics , presentation (obstetrics) , section (typography) , subject (documents) , content analysis , computer science , representation (politics) , sociology , psychology , social science , library science , medicine , philosophy , politics , political science , law , radiology , operating system
This paper studies the research article as a subgenre of the scientific article and presents various approaches to its definition: linguo-epistemic, communicative-discursive, genre-stylistic, linguocultural and linguodidactic. The author proposes to differentiate the research article from a number of other subgenres of the scientific article according to the following features: dominant communicative goal, subject of the text, completeness of the subject’s representation, standardized structure, distribution channel, and volume. The research article is defined by the author as a subgenre of the scientific article with a standardized structure and volume fully representing the course and results of an original research in order to inform the academic community about it. The purpose of this paper was to identify and describe verbal and non-verbal means of implementing the macrostructure of the results and discussion sections in research articles in line with the genre discourse analysis. The material included English-language research articles in medical and linguistic journals. The analysis established the components of a typical content macrostructure of the results section (presentation of the results of the study, explanation of the results, comparison of the results with the hypothesis, intercomparison of the results) and the discussion section (generalization of the results, explanation/interpretation/evaluation of the results, comparison with the results of other studies) in an English-language research article, as well as described the main linguistic-discursive means of implementing this macrostructure. Moreover, the analysis revealed certain common features of medical and linguistic articles that determine the genre-specific universality of the research article: combination of verbal and visual graphic means for presenting the results, detailed explication of the obtained data and interpretation of the results, as well as consideration of one’s own findings against the background of similar results presented by other researchers. Thus, this paper expands our idea about the norm of the written mode of the Englishlanguage academic discourse.