The Rhetorical Patterns of the Indonesian Research Articles in Law and History Disciplines: A Genre-Based Analysis

Abstract

<p>There have been a considerable number of studies on the rhetorical patterns of Indonesian research articles (RAs); however, none of these studies has investigated RAs in the history and law disciplines, nor have they investigated the RAs as a whole entity. Also, intertextuality and grammatical functions have rarely been studied. Given these identified gaps, this study investigates the generic structure, intertextuality, and grammatical functions in Indonesian history research articles (IHRAs) and Indonesian law research articles (ILRAs) as a whole, examining the RAs from the introduction to the discussion. Each corpus consists of 15 RAs, so both corpora consist of 30 RAs.</p> <p>The introduction, method, results, discussion (IMRD) framework is employed to analyse the generic macrostructure. Then, to analyse the microstructure, several models are used for the analysis. The CARS model (Swales, 1990) and the Isocpol model (Adnan, 2010) are used to analyse the introduction section, Zhang and Wannaruk’s model (2016) is used to analyse the method section, and Tessuto’s (2015) and Hopkins and Dudley-Evans’ models (1988) are used to investigate the results and discussion sections. Then, typologies from Wang (2006), Kuhi and Mollanghizadeh (2013), and Varga and Gradečak-Erdeljić (2017) are used to analyse the intertextuality. Typologies from Verspoor and Sauter (2000) and Moeliono in Mustika (2017) are used to analyse the grammatical functions.</p> <p>The results of the analysis reveal that IHRAs and ILRAs have similarities and differences, but their differences are minor. They also have similarities and differences when compared to English RAs. The key reason for the differences is that Indonesian researchers are not aware if they need to justify their RAs with a critical review of the literature and point to a niche such as a research gap in the literature (in the introduction section). It is not in their writing guides, nor is it required by the journal guides. Also, they are not aware that when commenting on the research findings, they need to compare them with findings presented in the literature (in the discussion section).</p>