La estructura retórica del resumen (abstract) en las disciplinas arte y diseño : un estudio descriptivo

Abstract

As an effective means of representing the research article, the abstract has increasingly become an essential part of this genre. For that reason, understanding the rhetorical conventions that govern abstract writing in their respective fields may help students and novice researchers acquire reading and writing skills in their fields of specialization. Recent research on the rhetorical features of abstracts has revealed broad patterns of regularity as well as disciplinary variation. Although several investigations have focused their analysis on a variety of disciplines, no study appears to have explored the rhetorical structure of abstracts in the fields of Art and Design. The present research, therefore, examines the rhetorical moves and main linguistic features of Art and Design abstracts, and proposes a schema for the abstract genre in each of these disciplinary domains. To conduct the study, a corpus of 30 abstracts from four high-impact journals was compiled, and subjected to a move analysis (Swales, 1981, 1990) using the analytical framework proposed by Pho (2008), and the methodology suggested by Dudley-Evans (1994) and Holmes (1997). The results reveal that although Art and Design abstracts bear some similarities, they also show some differences that result in distinct emerging patterns. Based on these findings, two models are proposed of the rhetorical elements that are constitutive of each discipline. The outcome of this research has pedagogical implications for students, novice researchers and teachers within ESP (English for Specific Purposes) contexts.