Rhetorical Moves and Linguistic Complexity of Abstracts on Theology Articles in Journals on Qurʾanic Studies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31436/alburhn.v6i2.239Keywords:
Theology, linguistic complexity, Qurʾanic studies, Islamic research articles, rhetorical movesAbstract
The present study attempts to discuss the rhetorical structure of the abstracts of theology research articles (RAs). The present study is aimed at finding the rhetorical structure of the translated abstract from Persian into English and comparing them with the original written in English and published in internal journals in theology sciences. This paper aims to investigate the rhetorical moves and linguistic complexity of abstracts in limited theological RAs. The researchers randomly chose 100 abstracts of research articles extracted from two Iranian journals of theology, i.e., Theology and Islamic Sciences of the Qur’an and Religious Enlightenment and Journal of Qurʾanic Interpretation and Language. Based on the convenience and accessibility of the first journal, only 10 RAs were selected, and another 90 abstracts were drawn from the second corpus. The framework used in this article is Pho’s (2008) framework. The analysis was conducted on the rhetorical moves and their linguistic realizations in these selected corpora. It was found that three moves, i.e., Introduction (I), Purpose (P), Discussion (D), were the conventional moves in the abstracts of RAs extracted from the mentioned journal. The frequency of occurrence Introduction (I) move in the corpus was three-time that of Finding (F) and about twice the Method (M) and Discussion (D) moves. The results also suggested that the present simple tense inactive form was the preferred choice to present the rhetorical moves. The other tenses and voices, such as passive and past tense, have a shallow frequency in the selected corpus. Furthermore, the simultaneous occurrence of two agents, i.e., active and passive, was only observed in the Introduction (I) and Discussion (D) moves. These two journals are published by Payame Noor University, which have the same and specific style, and following the instructions is mandatory for the authors of articles. However, by reviewing the articles of both journals and paying attention to the specific admission criteria in the context and related structure, there are obvious differences between the abstracts of articles in terms of applying the writing style and articulating the research method and other related matters, which in addition to the above reasons, also indicate the extent to which the authors of the articles do not pay attention to the research method. Some variations were observed in the introduction unit and language features. The data revealed that the translated abstracts from Persian into English in the theological research articles meet the determined criteria for scientific writing while the original ones often ignore the criteria although they are linguistically superior to the original English ones. With greater awareness of rhetorical moves and linguistic realizations, it is believed that writers can structure their abstracts more naturally to the conventional style used in their fields.
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