Ibérica (Apr 2008)
Dialogical surface text features in abstracts
Abstract
A sample driven description of Research Article-Comment-Reply (RA-C-R) abstracts in terms of abstract sentence length, reference, possessive structures, modal verbs and word range was carried out to find out whether their surface text features showed some trace of a dialogical construction of knowledge within the psychology discourse community. The study served an exploratory purpose. A Boolean search was conducted in the PsycLIT database yielding a sample of 149 PsycLIT RA-C-R abstracts (13,978 words). Relative frequency percent distributions were calculated for all variables, including reported speech verbs. Specific comparisons with a Medline corpus were conducted and variations were accounted for in terms of scientific discourse characteristics, field, database policies, and dialogical nature; that is, in the framework provided by the strands of research of quantitative applied linguistics, social concerns in genre analysis and the model monopoly theory developed in the implementation in sociology of the systems theory. The results suggest: (i) a word range affected by both psychology as a discipline and the dialogical content on which PsycLIT RA-C-R abstracts report; (ii) a complementarity of reference and possessive structures characterised by features of scientific discourse, feedback genres and dialogical dimensions; (iii) the presence of both deontic and epistemic modality in the modal verbs of our sample; (iv) and also that abstract length, sentence length and number of sentences per paragraph in our sample may not vary greatly in general terms from those of the social sciences.
