Abstracts in German medical journals: A linguistic analysis

摘要

Studies on contrastive genre analysis have become a current issue in research on languages for specific purposes (LSP) and are intended to economize specialist communication. The present article compares formal schemata and linguistic devices of German abstracts and their English equivalents, written by German medical scholars to English native speaker (NS) abstracts. The source material is a corpus of 20 abstracts taken from German medical journals representing different degrees of specialism/professionalism. The method of linguistic analysis includes 1.(1) the overall length of articles/abstracts,2.(2) the representation/arrangement of “moves”,3.(3) the linguistic means (complexity of sentences, finite verb forms, active and passive voice, tenses, linking words, and lexical hedging).Results show no correlation between the length of articles and the length of abstracts. In contrast to NS author abstracts, the move “Background information” predominated in the structure of the studied German non-native speaker (GNNS) abstracts, whereas “Purpose of study” and “Conclusions” were not clearly stated. In linguistic terms, the German abstracts frequently contained lexical hedges, complex and enumerating sentence structures, passive voice and past tense as well as linkers of adversative, concessive and consecutive character. The GNNS English equivalent abstracts were author translations and contained structural and linguistic inadequacies which may hamper the general readability for the scientific community. Therefore abstracting should be systematically incorporated into language courses for the medical profession and for technical translators.