ABSTRACT
The field of genre studies has developed in a num ber of different directions in the recent past (Bhatia, this volume). A num ber of spoken genres, such as graduate seminars (Weissberg, 1993), and lectures (Dudley-Evans, 1994b), have been studied in addition to m ore detailed studies of written genres, such as research articles, which have been the focus of study for a num ber of years. These studies on various genres, both oral and written, have inform ed us on the social construction of the texts, their characteristic rhetorical and lexico-grammatical features, and the ways in which they have evolved over time. Most of the studies on various genres are analyses of texts from a particular discipline. For example, Nwogu’s (1990) study of research article abstracts is limited to texts from one field, medicine. Alternatively, the texts for some genre studies have come from a num ber of different fields in order to neutralise any disciplinary effect on genre structure (e.g. Swales, 1990).
