Rhetorical and Textual Organization of English and Arabic PhD Dissertation Abstracts in Linguistics

This study compares English and Arabic PhD dissertation abstracts in the field of linguistics in an attempt to study the rhetorical and linguistic variations between the abstracts written in English and those written in Arabic. To this end, we have analyzed the rhetorical components that constitute the macrostructure of fifty English PhDs written in English and those written in Arabic. To this end, we have analyzed the rhetorical components that constitute the macrostructure of fifty English PhD dissertation abstracts written by English native speakers and those underlying fifty Arabic PhD dissertations written by native Arabic speakers following Swales‘ (1990) CARS model of RA introductions and Bhatia‘s (1993) IMRD move structure. The results showed differences between the two sets of data in generic structure preferences in terms of the type and frequency of moves and the linguistic realizations of these moves. The rhetorical variations across the two languages are most likely due to sociocultural and academic expectations. The differences related to certain linguistic realizations such as voice and tense choice are ascribed either to inherent linguistic differences between the two languages or to academic practice. The study highlights the importance of teaching abstracts writing skills to PhD candidates. 1. Abstract genre as an academic practice The abstract that accompanies research articles and dissertations is a notable practice in academic research as it constitutes a gateway to the reading or publication of a research article or a thesis (Lores 2004: 281). Salager-Mayer (1992) perceives this genre as a distinctive category of discourse intended to communicate factual new knowledge for members of different academic communities. The abstracts play a pivotal role in professional reading as they help readers decide on the relevance of an article to their interests (Busa 2005) and give researchers an adequate view of whether a particular longer text is worth reading. Similarly, MartinMartin (2003, 2005) notes that abstracts function as a time saving device by informing the readers about the content of the article, indicating whether the full text merits further attention. MOHAMMED N. AL-ALI AND YARA B. SAHAWNEH 8 PhD dissertation abstract writing is an academic practice that all candidates from different fields have to adopt when they write a full PhD thesis while doing their postgraduate course or research. In most cases writing a PhD dissertation is only attempted once in a graduate student‘s career. The great majority of dissertations are prefaced by an informative abstract, which contains a ―factual summary of the much longer report, and is meant to give the reader an exact and concise knowledge of the full [dissertation]‖ (Bhatia 1993: 78). The dissertation and research article abstract, as a genre, is a recognizable situated linguistic behavior in an institutionalized academic setting, having a set of communicative functions mutually-understood by established members of the academic community. Irrespective of the subject they serve, abstracts function as being ―advance indicators of the content and structure of the following text‖ (Swales 1990: 179). The abstract is meant to function as a representation as in Bazerman (1984: 58), front matters as in Swales (1990: 179), as a summary as in Bhatia (1993: 78) and Kaplan et al. (1994: 405). Though each dissertation is prefaced by an abstract and both are prepared by the same author, meant for the same readership and share the same contextual configuration, the abstract is thought of as a distinct and independent discourse genre of an associated text (i.e. dissertation or research article). Each genre has a well-defined communicative purpose articulated by its overall rhetorical organization. As stated by Van Dijk (1980), the abstract can be viewed as an integral piece of discourse; it can appear in abstracting journals and in on-line retrieval systems which publish paper abstracts. Its appearance in abstracting journals is designed to lead the readers back to the original text (Swales 1990). Given this merit, information scientists have been interested in the standards that would increase the quality and retrievability of abstracts (Chan & Foo 2004) and that would assess the content of a publication and facilitate the retrieval process (Lin et al. 2006). For Ventola (1994: 333), abstracts ―have become a tool of mastering and managing the ever increasing information flow in the scientific community‖ as they are the first part of the dissertation or the research article to be read. ENGLISH AND ARABIC PHD DISSERTATION ABSTRACTS IN LINGUISTICS 9 2. The features of abstracts in previous literature Previous studies have mainly focused on investigating the rhetorical and linguistic features of research article abstracts attempting to identify and describe the relation between the different moves that constitute this genre and the linguistic features that indicate each of its component moves. Some of these studies focused on research article abstract in specific disciplines, other studies shed light on variations across disciplines and cultures, and others examined the possible impact of language choice in abstracts. For instance, Salager-Meyer (1990, 1992), Busch-Lauer (1995), Anderson & Maclean (1997) and Lin et al. (2006) focused on the rhetorical structure of medical English abstracts; Huckin (2001) on biomedicine; Gibson (1993) explored certain linguistic variables that affect the success of abstract in the field of information and library science; Santos (1996), Hyland (2000), Dahl (2004) and Lores (2004) investigated the textual and rhetorical moves along with some of the linguistic features that express abstracts in linguistics, and Pho (2008) considered the rhetorical moves and the authorial stance in the fields of applied linguistics and educational technology. Variation of abstracts across disciplines has been studied by different researchers (e.g. Melander et al. 1997, Hyland 2000, Huckin 2001, Samarj 2002, Stotesbury 2003, Dahl 2004, Bondi, 2005, and Busa 2005). For example, Melander et al. (1997) examined the possible impact of language choice in abstracts from three different disciplines and find that linguistics and biology abstracts produced in ―the American context are different in their overall organization‖. Huckin (2001) found that biomedical research article abstracts often do not include the purpose move. Along the same lines, Samraj (2002) showed that the centrality claim moves are more crucial in the abstracts of Conservation Biology than those in Wildlife Behavior. Stotesbury (2003) demonstrated that evaluation attributes were twice as common in the humanities and social science abstracts as in those from the natural sciences. Bondi (2005) found that scientific procedures are foregrounded in economics abstracts. This tendency was also confirmed by Busa (2005), who confirmed a preference for the thematization of discourse products and procedures in economics abstracts. In contrast, psychology abstracts, as reported by Busa, reflected a preference for the foregrounding of the discourse objects over discourse products and procedures. MOHAMMED N. AL-ALI AND YARA B. SAHAWNEH 10 Martin-Martin (2005) pointed out that the choice of certain rhetorical options to convey knowledge claims vary across a number of dimensions, including languages and cultures. Regarding language, there has been a number of contrastive or comparative studies that have investigated variations in rhetorical strategies of written abstracts in English and those in other languages (e.g. Melander et al. 1997; Martin-Martin 2003; MartinMartin & Burgess 2004; Bonn & Swales (2007). In an attempt to find the impact of language choice in abstracts from three different disciplines in the United States and Sweden, Melander et al. (1997) reported that linguistics abstracts showed strong national and cultural differences, and biology abstracts produced in ―the American context are different in their overall organization‖. Martin-Martin (2003) investigated the rhetorical variation between the research article abstracts written in English and those written in Spanish in the field of experimental social sciences. The results revealed a strong tendency on the part of Spanish writers to exclude the Results section as opposed to the high frequency of this unit (86%) in the abstracts written in English. Likewise, Establishing a niche was selected in 42% of English abstracts whereas it is considerably lower (15%) in Spanish abstracts. The researcher relates the latter differences to socio-cultural factors such as the relationship between the writer and the academic community he addresses. In a subsequent study in the field of experimental social sciences, Martin-Martin (2005) offered an account of how the rhetorical practices including hedging devices, the use of first pronouns and the expressions of criticism that academics in English and Spanish use in the area of phonetics and psychology are a reflection of the social relations between writers and readers within different discourse communities and different cultures. In a comparison between Spanish and English abstracts, MartinMartin and Burgess (2004) found that English abstracts showed more criticism than their Spanish counterparts. In particular, English abstracts tended to make more use of impersonal and indirect ways of criticizing than their Spanish counterparts. In their analysis of English and French abstracts selected from English and French monolingual journals, Bonn and Swales (2007) found that French abstracts displayed less instances of use of first person singular pronouns; instead, they preferred using first person plural pronouns even though all the abstracts were single-authored, ENGLISH AND ARABIC PHD DISSERTATION ABSTRACTS IN LINGUISTICS 11 whereas in the English abstracts, the choice was determined by the number of aut