Exploring genre sets : Research article sections in two illustrative humanities and science disciplines

is the section that contains least use of hedges presumably because of word limit and precision and conciseness in word choices. The finding in the current study is different from previous research where, for instance, Rounds (1982) found a great amount of hedging in the study of 14 abstracts from a journal The behavioral and brain sciences. It is also likely that in order to promote (and sell) their research in the field, it is important for writers to more explicitly and directly present or evaluate propositional information as to their studies in abstracts. General discussion. Overall, several aspects in genre analysis of the study confirm to those of previous studies: introductions in humanities disciplines such as AL are longer than the hard discipline, computer science, the longest of all 6 sections analyzed in the two disciplines (Hyland, 2000). Discussions again are the most heavily hedged section of all (e.g., Salager-Meyer, 1994). Additionally, rank orders of hedge classes in the two disciplines, based on incidents found in the twenty-four articles, indicate that both auxiliaries and lexical verbs were used the most often in the two areas, but adverbs were the least. As for variation between the two disciplines, only the importance of establishing the territory (centrality claims) move, not the gap move, parallels in CS abstracts and introductions. No consistent relationship can be found in the other aspects of abstracts and introductions between the AL and CS disciplines. Comparison of the introductions and discussions between the two areas indicate they move by following a mirror-image: from outside-in, then inside-out, with much more emphasis on moves one and three in the two genres. The frequency for each move is slightly different in respective disciplines of the two genres. Other minor sporadic variation between the AL and CS corpora is also noted, which warrants future thorough analysis and explanation. Conclusion and Implications The current study examined genre sets between the applied linguistics and computer science disciplines from the perspectives of functional moves and hedge use. Systematic similarity and differences between the two disciplines and across the genre sets (abstracts, introduction, and discussion) were found. Across the three sections of articles, applied linguistic authors may exhibit different moves from computer science authors. However, their use of hedges bears a great amount of resemblance to each other. It seems that given the two illustrative disciplines, the humanities discipline shares some register features with the science discipline, but there are still disciplinary variations that require EAP teachers’ attention when they are teaching either a homogeneous or a heterogeneous group regarding students’ disciplinary background. These findings are useful for EAP learners on academic writing to become aware of both variations across genres (different sections in a research article) as well as between disciplinary boundaries. Future research may involve comparisons of genre sets from other perspectives that may involve a larger corpus from more disciplines. Further, as suggested by Swales (1990), one under-investigated aspect of abstracts is “their role in the process of RA construction” (p. 181). How abstracts are conditioned by, or shaping different sections of the research articles may be an interesting direction for further exploration.