Rhetorical Variation in English and Italian Law Research Article Abstracts: A Cross-Linguistic Analysis

The study of academic discourse has become an area of great interest over the last two decades, especially from a genre perspective (e.g. Swales 1990, 2004; Bhatia 1993, 2004). Research in the field has mainly focused on highly conventionalised written academic genres, such as research articles, abstracts, and textbooks, often combining linguistic and rhetorical analysis. Although not as widely studied as the research article itself or the textbook, the abstract has drawn the attention of a number of genre researchers (Salager-Meyer 1990; Bhatia 1993; Kaplan et al. 1994; Santos 1996; Bondi 1997, 2001; Hyland 2000; Martín-Martín 2003; Dahl 2004; Lorés-Sanz 2004, 2009; Samraj 2005; Pho 2008; Bondi and Cavalieri 2012; Bondi and Lorés-Sanz 2014). Genre-based studies on research article (RA) abstracts have received quite a lot of scholarly attention in English (e.g. Graetz 1985; Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995; Santos 1996; Hyland 2000; Lorés-Sanz 2004; Cross and Oppenheim 2006; Swales and Feak 2009), across different disciplinary fields (Harvey and Horsella 1988; Salager-Meyer 1990; Tibbo 1992; Lindeberg 1996; Anderson and Maclean 1997; Hartley and Benjamin 1998; Samraj 2005; Busch-Lauer 2014; Cavalieri 2014), and across cultures. There are studies comparing English with Spanish (Martín-Martín 2003, 2005; Lorés-Sanz 2009), French (Crosnier 1993; Van Bonn and Swales 2007; Alonso-Almeida 2014; Hatzitheodorou 2014), Portuguese (Johns 1992), German (Busch-Lauer 1995), Swedish (Melander et al. 1997), and Arabic (Alharbi and Swales 2011). One notable exception to date is lack of attention to abstracts written in Italian. The context of this work is provided by a previous study (Diani 2014) which looked at the rhetorical structure of English and Italian RA abstracts in the field of linguistics. The aim of the present study is to extend previous observations to the field of law, with the intent of investigating the rhetorical preferences that characterize the members of the international and Italian scientific communities in this disciplinary field. Within this field, extensive research has been conducted on the analysis of non-academic texts (e.g. Bhatia 1993, 2008; Gotti and Williams 2010; Bhatia et al. 2012). To the best of our knowledge, however, little attention has been paid to the analysis of academic legal texts such as RAs (Feak et al. 2000; Tessuto 2008; Peacock 2011; Sala 2012, 2014; Tessuto 2015), and RA abstracts in particular: in fact, only few studies are known to us (Frey and Kaplan 2010; Tessuto 2012; Hatzitheodorou 2014; Sala 2014; Cavalieri and Preite forthcoming). This paper seeks to fill the gap by providing insights into variation across the two cultures emerged from the linguistic realisations of the rhetorical moves characterizing the abstract genre in the discipline of criminal law.