“We examine the relationship …”: Grammatical Subject in Research Article Abstracts: Disciplinary and Functional Analysis

Research article abstract acts as an important device to manage information and to let the reader decide whether it is merit to continue reading the research article. In this paper, we intend to investigate the frequencies and discourse functions of types of grammatical subject (unmarked theme) used in research article abstracts from four disciplines. To this end, 300 research article abstracts were randomly selected (75 from each discipline) from leading prestigious journals in the four disciplines namely Applied Linguistics, Economics, Agriculture, and Applied Physics, and were analyzed based on Gosden’s (1993) classifications that include 16 types of grammatical subject. The results indicated that only six types of grammatical subject were used in the corpus and the frequencies of these types varied across the four disciplines. Besides, the results reported high similarities concerning the discourse functions served using the grammatical subject types. Thus, it could be concluded that the selection and discourse functions of the grammatical subject types are imposed by conventions of writing research article abstracts. The results could add to the existing knowledge of writing research article abstract in the analyzed disciplines by increasing awareness concerning selections of grammatical subject types.