Genre Variation and Changes in Frame Sequences Across Cultures: The Case of Criminology RA Abstracts in English and French

Abstract

Though not as widely studied as the Research Article (RA), the abstract has attracted increasing interest among researchers over last decades (Swales 1990, Bhatia 1993, Dos Santos 1996, Lorés-Sanz 2008, Bondi/Cavalieri 2012, Cavalieri 2014). A number of contrastive or comparative studies of abstracts in English and other languages (Martín-Martín 2005, Lorés Sanz 2006, Van Bonn & Swales 2007, Diani 2014) have already been carried out considering mainly the hard sciences and some soft sciences such as linguistics and history, however no cross-cultural analyses have been conducted so far between RA abstracts in English and RA abstracts in French published in the legal field.

Keywords

• criminology abstract
• imrd rhetorical move
• frame sequences
• (im)personal/locational patterns
• cross-cultural variation