A Cross-Linguistic and Cultural Analysis of Structure Moves in Arabic and English Police and Security Research Article Abstracts

Abstract

As an academic genre, an abstract is an obligatory step that researchers across disciplines and languages should write to join their discourse community.  Therefore, genre analysts have broadly employed move analysis in identifying the rhetorical structures and variations in research article abstracts from a specific discipline and across disciplinary areas. Analysis of abstracts has been involved in a quite few cross‐linguistic and cultural studies, and never been conducted on police and security abstracts.  Hence, this study examined the rhetorical structures of abstracts in police and security sciences, and across two distinct languages, Arabic and English.  The corpus consisted of 30 Arabic abstracts and 30 English abstracts. The data was analyzed using two move models: Swales' (1990) CARS model and Hyland's (2000) five-move structure.  The results showed that RA abstracts in both languages varied in their use of Swales' moves and did not favor one pattern of moves.   However, Move 3 (Occupying the niche) was found to be obligatory in all RA abstracts.  Move 2 (Establishing a niche) was the least move used in these RA abstracts.  The results also showed that many of the Arabic RA abstracts employed three of Hyland's moves:  introduction, purpose, and product.  In contrast, English RA abstracts had the move sequence of introduction, purpose, method, and product.  Most of these RA abstracts omitted the conclusion move.  From a disciplinary perspective, the preferred move structure in police and security RA abstracts is introduction, purpose, method, and product.  Due to the variation in the use of moves within the two languages; it is not possible to conclude that cross-linguistic and cultural factors affected the way RA abstracts were written.