Thematicity in research article abstracts: A cross-disciplinary study

This paper attempted to see how thematic structures are tackled by research article writers from different disciplines coming from different academic discourse community while contributing their new knowledge in the abstract section of research article. Following Halliday's (1994) model of thematic organization and the revised model of thematic progression pattern proposed by McCabe's (1999), the present study incorporated a corpus of 10 academic research article abstracts from two disciplines (5 in Chemical Engineering and 5 in Applied Linguistics) so as to clarify the possible similarities and variations between these two disciplines in light of thematic selection. The result supported the hypotheses that academic research article abstracts are shaped by their disciplinary background.