English and French journal abstracts in the language sciences: Three exploratory studies

This article compares French and English academic article abstracts from the language sciences in an attempt to understand how and why language choice might affect this part-genre—both in actual use and according to authors’ linguistic and rhetorical perceptions. Two corpora are used: Corpus A consists of abstracts from a French linguistics journal and a corresponding English one; Corpus B contains paired French and English abstracts from the bilingual EAP journal ASp; additionally, we report on e-mail interview findings from two of the ASp authors. Differences emerged at three levels. First, it was found that certain features such as choice of voice are ascribable to general differences between the two languages. Second, it would appear that personal pronoun use, sentence length and transition word selection can be aligned with expectations as to what constitutes appropriate academic style. Thirdly, differences in the way the research reported is “situated” are most likely due to differences in discourse community size. The methodological implications of these studies are discussed at the close.