Information on the thesis

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.