Linguistics Features in Academic Abstracts Published in Agriculture Research Articles: A Corpus-Based Approach

Abstract

Previous studies (e.g., Santos, 1996; Samraj, 2002; Stotesbury, 2003; Pho, 2008) on the rhetorical structure and linguistic features of abstracts have illustrated that disciplinary variation in abstracts is discernible. Corpus-based approach is used to study research article abstracts in some other fields: linguistics, medical sciences, biology and engineering. Most of Thai universities offer bachelor and postgraduate level in the field of agriculture. However, there is no study has explored the linguistic features of research article abstracts in the field of agriculture. The present study aims to explore the linguistic features of the corpus of 100 research article abstracts in the field of agriculture published in  international journal between the years 2014 and 2015. It was found linguistic feature variations in the choices of verb tenses, the appearance of problem statements, the use of first person pronouns, and the use of modal verbs. The findings may have pedagogical implications for novice writers.