Discourse features of scientific abstracts on agricultural topics in the English language

Abstract

The article describes the discourse features of abstracts of scientific papers on agriculture: logicality, abstractness, performativity, terminology, specific sentence length, structural categories and components. It was found that the logicality was achieved due to contrastive, elaborative, inferential and temporal discourse markers in the abstracts of the scientific publications on agriculture in the English language. The abstractness was expressed by the predominance of indefinite or zero articles and the use of words describing processes and phenomena. The terminology of the abstracts of the scientific articles on agricultural topics was described in accordance with the following classification: 1) well-known terms; 2) special professional terms; 3) abbreviations. The performativity was manifested in the first person material presentation using general science clichés. The predominance of sentences the length of which ranges from 16 to 25 words was observed in the abstracts of the scientific articles on the agricultural topics. It was found that most of these abstracts were characterized by the following structural components: background (72%), aims (73%), research methods and materials (62%), results (80%), conclusions (58%).