Genre Analysis of Research Dissertation Abstracts

Genre analysis has become one of the most important approaches to text analysis,especially in the field of English for Specific Purposes.Abstract is the essential part of the paper,which helps the readers get initial impressions.Because of its particular the usage of communication,it has its special rules and mode.The purpose of this paper was to present the 5-move model characteristic of research dissertation abstracts,and explore the linguistic characteristics of each move.The analysis started from the macrostructure,i.e from the text as a whole,towards the microstructure which included linguistic description (syntactic and lexical).The results showed that most abstracts followed 5-move model and the linguistic features of this genre.