Forms and functions of vague language in academic journal article abstracts

This paper reports on an exploratory investigation of the IMRaD moves (Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion) which show the degree of informativeness in terms of referential explicitness of academic texts and of use of vague language in academic journal abstracts published in 2010 and 2011. The areas of research these articles focus on are: language and linguistics, literature and cultural studies. The analysis of the data, based on an existing analytical framework (Cutting, 2012), revealed that authors use vague language (e.g.: ‘general nouns’, ‘hedging devices’ and ‘vague quantifiers’) and that the abstracts mostly consist of the introduction and discussion moves. Results of research into the writing of article abstracts may benefit both novice academic text writers and academics guiding their work.