Mood Choices and Functions in Background Information of Arts-Based Research Article Abstracts

Abstract

Motivated by the scanty of works on background information of abstracts, this article analyses the discourse functions of mood choices in background information of arts-based research article abstracts. Background information segments of three hundred abstracts of arts-based research articles obtained from the internet and purposively selected were analysed using insights from the systemic functional linguistic tool of mood. Given the generic compliant function – based categorisation adopted, five kinds of indicative mood structures namely; mission indicative mood, premises setting, assumption indicative mood; justification and classification mood are found to characterise the data but premises setting mood choices which function to: (i) give historical background to the study; (ii) define concept(s) that are central to the study at hand; (iii) anchor or state the research objective(s) and (iv) build up arguments against existing (previous) studies with a view to establishing the justification for the current research are observed to be predominant in the data. This study concludes therefore that an understanding of mood choices and their generic compliant functions has potency of finding lasting solution to the problems being encountered by budding academics in writing their Background Information (BI). It equally serves as useful material for academic discourse pedagogy.

Keywords

• mood structure
• generic-compliant function
• background information
• research article abstracts
• arts-based journals