On English and Italian research article abstracts: genre variation across cultures

This article compares English and Italian research article (RA) abstracts from linguistics journals in an attempt to investigate whether there is linguistic and rhetorical variation in the abstract genre from a cross-cultural perspective. From this perspective, a comparative dimension of the analysis seems important, one which would allow for the study of genre variation across cultures. While a number of contrastive or comparative studies of abstracts in English and other languages, including the major European languages, particularly Spanish (Valero Garcés & Calle Martínez 1997; Martín- Martín 2005; Lorés Sanz 2006), French (Van Bonn & Swales 2007), Portuguese (Johns 1992), German (Busch-Lauer 1995) and Swedish (Melander, Swales & Fredrickson 1997) have already been carried out, no cross-cultural analyses have been conducted so far between RA abstracts published in English and RA abstracts published in Italian. The results show that the Italian abstracts under investigation largely follow the international conventions based on the norms established by the English-speaking international academic community, i.e. Bhatia’s (1993) model including four rhetorical moves (Purpose, Methods, Results, Conclusion). However, variation across the two cultures emerged from the linguistic realizations of moves. Cross-cultural implications of the genre use are discussed at the close.