Theme Types and Patterns in Research Article Abstracts: A Cross Disciplinary Study

s were written using two different rhetorical structures of CARS and IMRD. The findings of her study suggested that thematic organization is highly related to the rhetorical organization of abstract. Pho (2008) studied the linguistic realizations of macro structures of RA abstracts from two disciplines of Applied Linguistics and Educational Technology. Findings of the study showed that linguistic features could distinguish the moves of abstracts. The findings also highlighted some disciplinary differences. Kanoksilapatham (2013) scrutinized the generic characteristics of RA abstracts from discipline of Civil Engineering. She analyzed 60 abstracts from top journals of civil engineering. The results highlighted that there is an academic style of writing special to the discipline. Ebrahimi and Chan (2015) studied the grammatical subject used in research article abstracts from two disciplines of Economics and Applied Linguistics. The data of their study was 60 research article abstracts (30 from each discipline). Their findings suggested some disciplinary differences concerning the use of the grammatical subjects. From the literatures reviewed here, it should be noted that limited studies are available on the realization of Halliday’s (1985) notion of theme as a cohesive linguistic feature in RA abstract across disciplines. Thus, this has motivated the present study to shed the light on the realizations of theme types and patterns of progression in the RA abstracts from four disciplines, namely, Applied Linguistics (AL), Economics (Eco), Agriculture (Agri) and Applied Physics (AP). Therefore, this study intends to answer the following questions: 1. How are the Theme types manifested in the RA abstracts across four disciplines, namely, AL, Eco, Agri, and AP? 2. How are the thematic progression patterns manifested in the RA abstracts across four disciplines, namely, AL, Eco, Agri, and AP? While different functional definitions of the notion of Theme are to be found in the work of many scholars, this paper will use the definition suggested by Halliday (1985). He defines Theme as the element in a particular structural configuration taken as whole. It organizes the clause as a message and provides the configuration of Theme and rheme. Based on this definition, a clause is made of two parts, Theme followed by rheme. 2. Methodology 2.1 Selecting the Disciplines and Journals To select disciplines which capable of representing the spread of disciplines across academic context, the researcher adopted Becher’s (1989) taxonomy of disciplines. Becher (1989) classified academic disciplines into soft and hard sciences. He further added that hard science includes science disciplines while soft science includes the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Becher (1989, 1994) also classifies the disciplines of each science into pure and applied. Thus, based on Becher’s (1989, 1994) classification of disciplines, four disciplines of Economics (soft-pure), Applied Linguistics (soft-applied), Agriculture (hard-pure) and Applied Physics (hardapplied) were selected for this study. International Journal of English Language & Translation Studies ISSN:2308-5460 Volume: 04 Issue: 03 July-September, 2016 Cite this article as: Ebrahimi, S. (2016). Theme Types and Patterns in Research Article Abstracts: A Cross Disciplinary Study. International Journal of English Language & Translation Studies. 4(3), 104-115. Retrieved from www.eltsjournal. org Page | 106 Next step was selecting journals, which represent the disciplines selected. To this end, four journals of ‘Oxford Economic Papers’ and ‘Applied Linguistics’ published by Oxford University Press and ‘The Journal of Agricultural Science’ and ‘The European Physical Journal Applied Physics’ published by Cambridge University Press were selected. All of these four journals are indexed in Thompson and Reuters. The rationale behind selecting these journals was to have a corpus which is representative of RA abstracts produced by successful writers or what Mauranen (1996) called “good text”. She states that: “We here take the typical native speaker user in edited and published texts as a criterion for acceptable use, and regard any text that meets this criterion as ‘‘good’’. In this way, all L1 texts in the material are good texts by definition. Even though, they cannot be held up as ideal models, their typical features can be used as a guide to the working of text in that language” (p. 213). 2.2 Selecting the RA abstracts One hundred and twenty (120) RA abstracts with 30 RA abstracts from each journal selected as a representation of each discipline made up the corpus for the analysis in this study. All the RA abstracts were extracted from the RAs published in the 2010 to 2012 volumes as regular RAs and they implied the Swales (1990) IMRD (Introduction, Method, Result, Discussion) structure. The details of corpus are summed