Legal Research Article Abstracts: Text Analysis and Text Transformation

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2010 in the subject English - Grammar, Style, Working Technique, grade: 1,0, University of Vienna (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: This paper deals with the professional, specialized genre of legal research article abstracts about different legal matters (for instance, the EU's anti-doping policy, European property law, fiduciary duties, drug law enforcement, software license agreements, p2p music file-sharing copyright). First, a detailed text analysis of 12 abstracts of legal research articles is presented, including description of the discourse community, communicative purposes, move structure and lexico-grammatical features. Second, a transformation of one abstract into a newspaper article, i.e. a text type for a different, non-specialist audience, is carried out. In addition, a rationale explaining and justifying the lexical, grammatical, structural and stylistic choices made for the transformation is provided. Lastly, the paper is rounded off with a reflection on the analysis and transformation.