A corpus analysis of the discourse structure of Persian theses abstracts in some disciplines of humanities, engineering, and basic sciences

The purpose of this research is to analyze the discoursal structure of Persian theses abstracts in various disciplines, determining their rhetorical structure, and finding out the similarities and differences between them. To do this, three scientific fields of humanities, engineering, and basic sciences were chosen for analysis. For humanities, the disciplines of philosophy and linguistics were chosen. For engineering, the disciplines of electrical and mechanical engineering were chosen. For basic sciences, the disciplines of chemistry and physics were chosen. For each discipline, 40 abstracts were selected from IranDoc’s Ganj repository and gathered in a file. Then the rhetorical structure of these abstracts was annotated based on Hyland’s five-move model. In the next stage, rhetorical moves of each discipline and their general pattern were determined. Results indicate that the dominant move pattern for most disciplines is I-P-M-Pr and P-M-Pr with some minor differences observed within the discipline of philosophy and chemistry.