The comparative study of scientific article structure: the category of retrospection

Success in scientific results promotion depends on the quality of academic writing in journal publications. Peculiarities of using various linguistic means play a significant role in it. Thus, a detailed research of these means in scientific articles is of great importance nowadays. An effective tool for the research is the conceptual and methodological fundamentals of text linguistics. It considers the text structure as a communicative system with a number of properties that can be presented as a set of basic categories, which, however, have specific features in different styles and genres. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to provide a comparative study of the linguistic means used to present the category of retrospection in Russian and English journal publications selected by random sampling. The results of the studies reveal the following types of retrospection: textual retrospection (accurate / inaccurate retrospection, references to theories, facts previously discussed in the text of the article, repetitions, summation and generalization) and extra textual retrospection (fixed and unfixed retrospection, historical review, references to papers or theories of other scientists and previous researches of the authors). From the point of view of linguistic means, the common thing is the use of all types of textual retrospection (the exception is the absence of markers of exact retrospection in Russian-language articles), as well as similar lexical and grammatical content used in the compared linguistic cultures. The main difference is the more frequent use of these means in English articles, which indicates greater degree of consistency of the presented material compared to Russian articles. The results of the study can be used to develop a set of recommendations for academic writing in Russian and English.