Respondent
Theme
Structural-compositional and linguistic-cognitive principles of scientific medical article and abstract (based on American scientific journal periodicals (years 1992–2001).
Defence Date
Annotation
Thesis for the Candidate Degree in Philology, by speciality 10.02.04 – Germanic
languages. L’viv Ivan Franko National University. Ministry of Education and Science of
Ukraine, L’viv, 2015.
The peculiarities of representing medical article and abstract in American
scientific medical journals have been researched. The dissertation focuses its attention on
research articles and the ways of composing abstracts to them on the basis of functional
and formal approaches. These approaches helped to review medical scientific journals,
classify them and single out the articles with abstracts attached.
Three types of articles were chosen for analysis: research, descriptive and review
ones. Research and descriptive articles appeared not to have principal differences and
were analyzed in the same context. Discourse analysis of the articles showed hetero-
geneity of their functional structure specified by several factors: the type of the journal;
editorial board requirements; author’s cognitive and pragmatic intentions; medical
branch peculiarities.
The basis of the functional analysis was the structure of moves and steps, with the
aim of clarifying cognitive and pragmatic models of information organization in
research, descriptive and review articles. The problem of marked/unmarked article and
abstract texts was an important aspect of the research, with the further investigation of
mechanisms in transforming discourse and text of an article into the abstract to it.
The research analysis has been performed on the basis of marked and unmarked
abstracts, comparing these abstracts with functional and text marking in the corres-
ponding articles. Three categories of formal markers in abstracts were singled out:
1) typical (used in most research articles); 2) selective-typical (used in minority but they
cannot be considered arbitrary); 3) others (they reflect special moves used for structure
discourse in abstracts). There exists strict cohesion of discourse information presenting:
quantitative and qualitative presenting of the research data; argumentation of data
selection criteria; data analysis description. At the text level there is certain regularity in
presenting research information: frequent use of passive constructions, which help to
refer to the source of information; Past Simple Tense is used as a formal indicator to the
data; the use of explicit lexemes.
In review articles the author concentrates on a certain problem in order to present
all available information concerning it. The abstracts to them are not restricted by
editorial requirements.
The differential methods of compression were covered as the principal means in
the process of discourse and text data extraction for abstracts.
Key words: discourse, text, article, abstract, marking, compression, functional
structures, differential analysis.