Presentation on Linguistic realisations of the gap statement

Description

The conference abstract or proposal is a promotional genre, intended to secure the acceptance of a paper at a conference and often (especially in the 'hard' disciplines) in subsequent proceedings. It is therefore, as Hyland and Tse (2005) note, a high-stakes genre, and therefore one which early-career researchers need to master. One promotional resource is to show the research to be novel and original; to demonstrate (in Swales' 1990 terms) that a gap exists in the research literature. Given that a significant proportion of space in abstracts is given over to material which corresponds to the introduction in the paper itself (Cutting, 2012), opportunities for highlighting the gap exist. However, not all authors take advantage of this opportunity. Just over 40% of the TESOL abstracts were found not to contain a 'gap statement' (Halleck and Connor, 2006). This paper will report the results of an investigation into conference abstracts in a range of academic disciplines. Two corpora, one consisting of abstracts written by postgraduates during an academic writing course, and one consisting of accepted and published abstracts were analysed for two features: the presence or absence of a 'gap' statement, and the lexical and structural routines used for describing the gap. Comparisons between the corpora will be presented, and implications for the academic writing classroom will be addressed. References Cutting, D. J. (2012). Vague language in conference abstracts. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 11, 283–293. Halleck, G. B., & Connor, U. M. (2006). Rhetorical moves in TESOL conference proposals. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5, 70–86. Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (2005). Hooking the reader: a corpus study of evaluative that in abstracts. English for Specific Purposes, 24, 123–139. Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Period	18 Jan 2013
Held at	Swedish Symposium on Language for Specific Purposes