The evolution of the abstract as a genre: 1988-2008. The case of applied linguistics

Academic genres have been the centre of genre-based discourse studies over the last two decades and the rhetorical structures (IMRD) of the abstract have been tackled from a variety of perspectives (Swales, 1990; Ventola, 1994). The present study investigates the evolution of the abstract as a genre over a time span of twenty years (1988-2008) considering in particular the field of applied linguistics in order to demonstrate the rapid changes in communicative practices and linguistic patterns due to the pressure of technological innovations. The analysis is carried out on two corpora of abstracts (70 for 1988, 70 for 1998 and 70 for 2008) collected from applied linguistics journals and the study proposes an integration of corpus and discourse perspectives to make two main points. Firstly, the significant change in the genre textual patterns corresponds to a shift of the focus of the discipline from a more theoretical to a more empirical research perspective outweighing the results and discussion sections. Secondly, this shift also produced an interesting evolution of the role of the researcher and of his/her presence in the genre and consequently in the academic discourse community. To achieve these purposes, the analysis considers the distribution of metadiscourse items in the genre focusing the attention on frame markers (Hyland 2005) for what concerns textual metadiscourse, and on self mentions (Hyland 2005) for what concerns interpersonal metadiscourse. Results will show an increase of textual metadiscursive items linked to empirical considerations on data and results discussion and at the same time will highlight a massive presence of personal self mentions of the researcher from 1988 to 2008 abstracts.