Research Article Abstracts in Two Subdisciplines of Business—Move Structure and Hedging between Management and Marketing

The importance of RA abstracts lies in their influence on the readers’ decision about whether the accompanying article is worth reading. A number of studies have investigated the move structure of abstracts and have generated several influential models. However, little research has been conducted on subdisciplinary variations in move structure of abstracts. Additionally, previous studies have investigated independently either the move structure or the hedging use of academic writings. The attempt of the integration of the both have been lacking yet. Therefore, this study reports the analysis of move structure and hedging use in Management and Marketing abstracts. Comparative analysis was also conducted to investigate sudisciplinary variations in both move structure and hedging use between the two subdisciplines in the field of Business. In total, sixty-four research articles abstracts published in 2012 were randomly selected form eight leading journals in two subdisciplines. Hyland’s model (2000) was adopted as analytical framework for move structure analysis, and Wordsmith Tool was used to search hedging in the corpus. Results showed that the move structure of I-P-Pr (Introduction-Purpose-Product) is the most dominant sequences in both Management and Marketing. Regarding the use of hedging, all the five types occurred in both subdisciplines of Business. The findings of this study have also demonstrated the existence of variations in terms of both move structure and the use of hedging in the abstracts between the two subdisciplines. Therefore, pedagogical implications can be proposed that teaching practices should address the variations so as to meet the specific expectations from different particular discourse communities.