Abstract:

English is used to write research article abstracts even for papers that are published in other languages. In the language learning and teaching context, active research is being advanced by work in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), a subfield of applied linguistics. Recent ESP studies increasingly employ corpus linguistic techniques, with research article abstract texts being one of the frequently examined genres. In the present study, we used English-Japanese bilingual parallel corpora to comparatively examine the linguistic and punctuational features of English research article abstracts. The corpora consisted of English abstracts, written by experienced members of the discourse community, and their Japanese translations. We examined Swalesian move structures and hedging devices as well as punctuation, which has been suggested to be important in written genres. Punctuation conventions, which differ between English and Japanese, are often overlooked by both teachers and learners. In this study, we examined how the authors use: 1) hedging devices such as modal verbs, 2) the collocational framework “the...of”, and 3) punctuation marks such as semicolons. To do this, we compiled English-Japanese parallel corpora of approximately 200 medical research article abstracts from the 2018 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine and their official Japanese translations. We identified word profiles of the English abstracts, quantified modal verbs in all portions of the abstracts, and qualitatively examined the usage of modal verbs by comparison with the translated Japanese passages. We determined the usages of “the...of” and compared them with the Japanese translations. We also quantified punctuation marks such as periods, colons, semicolons, and commas, and the Japanese punctuation marks “kuten” for use at the end of a sentence and “toten” for use to indicate a contextual break. Semicolons, which have no equivalent in Japanese, were qualitatively examined and classified by how they were expressed in the Japanese translation. The English abstracts had about 5,000 types and 66,000 tokens, and a significant proportion (40%) of the sentences belonged to the results portion, followed by methods, conclusions, and background. The introduction section was the richest in modal verbs and the highest in their relative frequency. Some of the modal verbs such as may, could, and would were represented by the expression “kanouseigaaru” in Japanese. The framework “the... of”, including the rate of, the number of, and the level of, was represented by different expressions in the Japanese translation depending on the context. These findings suggest that the use of modal verbs and the framework “the... of” should be taught explicitly by using examples from the English-Japanese parallel corpora. The analysis of punctuation marks revealed that most of the semicolons were in the results section and were expressed as “toten” in the Japanese translations. We found that a sentence with “toten” in Japanese could be expressed as two sentences in English. Considering the language distance between English and Japanese, our findings show the usefulness of using examples from English-Japanese parallel abstract corpora to help students and novice researchers write research paper abstracts in English.

Keywords:

Research article abstracts, parallel corpora, genre, English for Specific Purposes (ESP).