The research article abstract is a highly condensed genre in which writers must package the essential content of a study for rapid processing by readers. This paper offers a theoretical-analytical account of the cognitive-pragmatic mechanisms that govern the structuring of information in scientific text and derives principles for studying these mechanisms in the abstract. Integrating three explanatory layers – the cognitive-pragmatic organisation of given and new information, the theme-rheme dynamics of Functional Sentence Perspective, and the rhetorical move structure of the abstract – the study argues that information structuring in the abstract is driven by cognitive economy and relevance, and that each rhetorical move carries a characteristic information-structure signature. On this basis, a set of methodological principles for the corpus-based study of information structuring in abstracts is proposed.

information structuring, cognitive pragmatics, given–new information, theme–rheme, Functional Sentence Perspective, research article abstract, move structure.

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