Adversative function in abstracts

Abstract

The adversative function, despite being frequent in the abstracts of scientific articles, is not described in detail in the literature. In addition to the basic rhetorical structure of academic abstracts (Swales, 1990), signaling, through contrast, either the motivating context of the research or the comparison/discussion of its results, is recurrent in this textual genre, regardless of the area of study. With the objective of describing the use and distribution of operators that establish an adversarial relationship in scientific abstracts, based on the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), this research analyzes a corpus composed of 28,121 abstracts, totaling 4,350,415 words. The results indicate that the ‘adversative’ argument (1) is rhetorically complex; (2) appears in different rhetorical movements of the abstract; and (3) it is used with high frequency, in particular to problematize the phenomenon under investigation as well as to support the presentation of results.